The people claiming that Twitter still being up proves they were vastly bloated need to read the following paragraphs until they "sink in":
> Our entire account team turned over multiple times in 2 weeks. We had multiple people (AE, AM, analyst, creative specialist) supporting our account and they all vanished without so much as an email. We finally got an email with a name for an AM last week but they quit and we don’t have a new one yet.
> Ads UI is very buggy and login with SSO and 2FA broken. One of my campaign managers logged in last week and found all our paused creatives from the past 6 years had been reactivated. Campaign changes don’t save. These things cost us real money.
The attention economy seems to be "forcing" people to jump to conclusions as fast as possible to write that viral post "X is dead", "goodbye Y", etc.
You can't just call for a business model change after only two weeks of such a radical management change. Twitter positioning is very strong and there is no real alternative/competitor. If users keep using Twitter advertisers will come back.
It is tiring and makes seemingly smart people look dumb.
This ignores the fact that Twitter was never a good ads business. Even in its heyday, it had a fraction of the ad revenue of Meta. They were just showing users less relevant ads, meaning less value to advertisers and less revenue generated.
You confidently state that they’ll be back if there are users. That’s not true. They’ll be back if they think their RoI will be better than alternatives. And it’s unclear if Twitter is capable of providing more value than YouTube, Meta, TikTok etc.
As the article points out, large enterprise clients require a human relationship and that’s something hard to provide with a massive staff cut.
They also don’t tolerate their brand being used alongside extreme content, and Twitter is telling the world that it’s going lax on moderation. Elon stated that directly in the recent tweet where he described the shadow banning process.
Twitter is looking at $1 billion a year just in interest payments, which is basically a 20% increase in total expenses compared to 2021, and they’re facing lower revenues.
No real alternative? Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Snap, Pinterest, YouTube, Reddit, Tumblr…
On top of that, any sales professional will tell you that competition includes doing nothing. Advertisers can just not spend and wait out the Twitter situation, especially during a recession.
Elon is going to need to show advertisers that he represents stable leadership rather than posting memes of women’s asses with Twitter logos on them. He’s not used to running a company where customers are buying a product that projects the customers’ own image into the world.
You know how Zuck is a boring G-rated robot? Advertisers love that.
Twitter was always the 'commercial break' of the internet. Ad spots on TV and radio were 15-30 seconds. On twitter you got 140 (now 280 characters). Its always been advertising. Sizzle clips, strong sentences with no meat. Why would you pay for advertising on a website whose entire purpose is advertising. Maybe their ad targeting is not strong. The risk now is you're supporting someone promoting hate, violence, lies..... Maybe someone is still there that honestly likes twitter and doesnt like exposure. But its always been the internet's commercial break.
There are so many competitors for Twitter. Every social media platform is an alternative. Twitter's only moat is the network effect, and they are ruining any chance of that being maintained by making the experience awful, not moderating the platform and reinventing people who the majority of users don't want to hear from.
A lot of this is a self fulfilling prophecy. There are many people who don’t want the “new” twitter to succeed and being vocal about it will result in advertisers leaving the platform making the whole thing collapse in on itself.
Twitter doesn’t have a valid competitor though (no mastodon is not it) so Elon might end up pulling it off. I hope he doesn’t though and I’m going to do what it takes to influence that decision.
I don't know how this ongoing "Twitter revolution" is going to turn out (out of pessimism, I bet the likelyhood of success is 3:7) but it does seem that musk et al. at least diagnosed correctly when saying that Twitter needs to find new revenue sources (other than ads) - NOT because there's anything inherently bad with ad money (there is!) - but because it is now clear that advertisers were not sticky on Twitter ad platform since they are so ready to jump ship en mass within weeks.
I have long heard about the idea of the great deception that is online advertisement despite the fact that in last couple of decades people have argued of how effective it is and how critical/unavoidable it is to advertise on certain platforms. It seems clear now that Twitter at least is not a critical platform for many brands.
> advertisers were not sticky on Twitter ad platform since they are so ready to jump ship en mass within weeks.
They were not sticky to Twitter, the platform, alone. But to Twitter, the platform, coupled with Twitter, the organization, and the high engagement of its relevant ad, sales and advertiser relationship teams.
Which is where Musk went wrong, because that was part of the company that he needlessly drove out. The exact opposite of bloat! At least until an equivalent revenue stream was secured.
Watch him turn it into an OnlyFans clone... seems like the only viable subscription model to earn enough to stay afloat, porn. If he implemented AI Porn features, could earn more. With patrion/substack style subscription features for the non-porn content too, maybe it works?
I don't think most ads are critical to specific platforms, especially if those platforms take a sudden turn of ownership. I'm sure if Facebook got bought out, somehow, and the new ownership started telling all of their ad clients that they have literally no plan for them, they would also leave in droves. [My understanding is that this is what Musk effectively did during an end-of-year reestablishment of annual advertising contracts, thereby Twitter got a lot of clients leaving the platform.]
This is just a second hand rehash of an anonymous and unverifiable comment on Blind. If there's a real adverising exodus, there must be better sources than that.
It’s anonymous as execs compared to Twitter who will never admit to these issues. It also tracks with what little I know about advertising.
Also… I think advertisers don’t want to be the spotlight, their job is to make their customers the spotlight. Publicly speaking out is likely a huge faux pas.
> I remember advertiser exodus from YouTube and advertiser exodus from Facebook, twice. They returned, eventually.
One thing we will find out - did they return on their own, or did they return because of persistent sales calls from FB and YT? Those are the part of the cuts - Twitter lost some very high profile relationships with brands that spend big. And it's reach/scale rarely justified dedicated campaigns - I'm sure most agencies are happy to not spend 20% of their time on 5% of their reach, compared to G and Meta.
the most recent advertiser exodus from youtube was mostly stemmed because youtube put in significant work to increase their content moderation and improve brand safety - that was when all your favourite edgy youtubers started complaining about having their videos demonetized.
As that financial advertiser said the problem with Twitter is that the performance and ROI of their campaigns has plummeted. That has nothing to do with recession and it's nothing like Youtube/Facebook which had external and temporary factors.
It's purely to do with Twitter not currently being able to run a competitive ad engine. And it ties directly with a large proportion of the engineers and data scientists being let go.
> The bigger problem is current recession. Budgets for ads are cut first.
Is this true? I've seen a lot of big budget ad investment from companies whose stocks have been tanking all year. It almost seems like they're trying to dig themselves out of a hole with marketing.
Unlike with engineering, there's very little practical or deep articles about issues like brand safety, etc. and most people seem like parroting the same arguments without anyone explaining why this is the case.
You can build Twitter clone from scratch without knowing anything about IT at the beginning and learn it on the process but you can't learn much about brands or advertising or marketing except for some high level talks.
I have no idea how so many people can analyse the Twitter ad situation, is everyone well versed in these topics?
I run a PR agency and in my experience, the bigger the brand, the more conservative they are. Many have dedicated brand teams who care only about how the brand is portrayed. Multiple independent departments would likely be weighing in on the issue. Unless Twitter was an enormously successful marketing channel for the business (it almost never is), why risk it?
It's easy to understand: people in most companies don't appreciate having their ads next to porn, extremist content, or violent content. Especially so when it's posted as a reply to the ads.
I know what you're saying. Imagine the kind of experience you'd need to get close to the dynamics here and provide real insight instead of parroting what you hear/assume to be the answer because it sounds reasonable.
This goes for most corporate discussion on HN where everyone talks with the authority of someone who deals with it daily. Unless you do have those insights, it's not all that interesting to regurgitate what we, the peanut gallery, suspect to be true.
Man. If you had told teenage me that on the 2022 equivalent of slashdot, tech folks would attack a communications platform for offending the sensibilities of Fortune 500 advertisers, I wouldn’t have believed you.
"A large coalition of political/social activist groups agreed not to try to kill Twitter by starving us of advertising revenue if I agreed to this condition.
The condition he's referring to is the moderation council he had announced. Apparently they demanded a council, he agreed, announced it, and then they pressured advertisers anyway?
This sounds like Illuminati conspiracy from Musk. Who is this “coalition”, and why would they be making deals on whether or not to attack his platform?
Also if they were actually activist, why would they be satisfied with just a moderation council? Surely if they cared about causes enough to agree to not criticize Twitter, they would criticize it for other things that would pop up?
This sounds like Elon didn’t bother setting up a council (there was never proof he tried) and is looking to spin the story now that advertisers are dropping off.
Remember that key advertisers dropped off before he even announced the idea of a council. They even specifically mentioned that his erratic behaviour was part of the reason.
I think Elon is going for the classic “victimhood” play to garner sympathy.
I noticed that. There was an announcement of a council, people from certain specific organizations were part of it, then a day later I noticed those same organizations had joined on to pressure advertisers to boycott Twitter. Seemed weird and a bit disheartening, seeing that I was hoping for the various parties to come to some sort of mutually beneficial understanding.
I don't buy it. Ok, I'm not a veteran ad spender, but the claim that after two weeks on Elon-Twitter the metrics shifted so drastically that it wasn't worth it doesn't make sense to me. If anything there's more eyeballs on Twitter than before.
I haven't seen an ad on Twitter in quite awhile, because I read single tweets linked to from somewhere else. I don't have an account, I don't have the mobile app, and I don't browse a feed.
The advertisers will return eventually. I'm anti-elon and anti-twitter, but as much as I would love to indulge in the schadenfreude, the collapse of twitter seems totally unrealistic.
I definitely hope that Twitter can find a better business model than advertising, which I think is fee for service. That has always been the best way, especially for social media. All the disinformation, the serotonin economy, the harassment, the impersonation–ALL the ills are reduced with a fee for service model.
I'm really interested in how this will turn out.
If he manage to improve Twitter after so many laid off I'll never take any big tech employee seriously ever again.
People speak as if twitter isn't going to hire more employees. Obviously they can't sustain themselves on the crew they have now long term. They have to realize this and they'll probably start hiring as needed.
So basically these companies are proving allegiance to a single political agenda. If you don’t censor those who are critical of people in power, (but only on behalf our specific friends who are in power) then we pull your funding. This has got to be the most unsettling thing I’ve seen in a long time, maybe ever.
[+] [-] FartyMcFarter|3 years ago|reply
> Our entire account team turned over multiple times in 2 weeks. We had multiple people (AE, AM, analyst, creative specialist) supporting our account and they all vanished without so much as an email. We finally got an email with a name for an AM last week but they quit and we don’t have a new one yet.
> Ads UI is very buggy and login with SSO and 2FA broken. One of my campaign managers logged in last week and found all our paused creatives from the past 6 years had been reactivated. Campaign changes don’t save. These things cost us real money.
[+] [-] cesarvarela|3 years ago|reply
You can't just call for a business model change after only two weeks of such a radical management change. Twitter positioning is very strong and there is no real alternative/competitor. If users keep using Twitter advertisers will come back.
It is tiring and makes seemingly smart people look dumb.
[+] [-] nindalf|3 years ago|reply
You confidently state that they’ll be back if there are users. That’s not true. They’ll be back if they think their RoI will be better than alternatives. And it’s unclear if Twitter is capable of providing more value than YouTube, Meta, TikTok etc.
[+] [-] dangus|3 years ago|reply
As the article points out, large enterprise clients require a human relationship and that’s something hard to provide with a massive staff cut.
They also don’t tolerate their brand being used alongside extreme content, and Twitter is telling the world that it’s going lax on moderation. Elon stated that directly in the recent tweet where he described the shadow banning process.
Twitter is looking at $1 billion a year just in interest payments, which is basically a 20% increase in total expenses compared to 2021, and they’re facing lower revenues.
No real alternative? Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Snap, Pinterest, YouTube, Reddit, Tumblr…
On top of that, any sales professional will tell you that competition includes doing nothing. Advertisers can just not spend and wait out the Twitter situation, especially during a recession.
Elon is going to need to show advertisers that he represents stable leadership rather than posting memes of women’s asses with Twitter logos on them. He’s not used to running a company where customers are buying a product that projects the customers’ own image into the world.
You know how Zuck is a boring G-rated robot? Advertisers love that.
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ProAm|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] enkid|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bergenty|3 years ago|reply
Twitter doesn’t have a valid competitor though (no mastodon is not it) so Elon might end up pulling it off. I hope he doesn’t though and I’m going to do what it takes to influence that decision.
[+] [-] 627467|3 years ago|reply
I have long heard about the idea of the great deception that is online advertisement despite the fact that in last couple of decades people have argued of how effective it is and how critical/unavoidable it is to advertise on certain platforms. It seems clear now that Twitter at least is not a critical platform for many brands.
[+] [-] anonymousab|3 years ago|reply
They were not sticky to Twitter, the platform, alone. But to Twitter, the platform, coupled with Twitter, the organization, and the high engagement of its relevant ad, sales and advertiser relationship teams.
Which is where Musk went wrong, because that was part of the company that he needlessly drove out. The exact opposite of bloat! At least until an equivalent revenue stream was secured.
[+] [-] tbrownaw|3 years ago|reply
Maybe they really are going to stay off Twitter in particular.
Maybe leaving will noticeably hurt sales and they'll quietly come back in a month or two once the noise has died down.
Maybe they'll notice no impact to sales and experiment with pulling back from other social sites as well (lol I wish).
[+] [-] kristintynski|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brightball|3 years ago|reply
I barely used Twitter over the past 10ish years and I'm spending more time on it than ever right now.
[+] [-] tptacek|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FranzFerdiNaN|3 years ago|reply
You dont do this by first discarding all your existing revenue sources.
[+] [-] PuppyTailWags|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jsnell|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] boplicity|3 years ago|reply
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/11/22/twitter...
[+] [-] philliphaydon|3 years ago|reply
I used to get ads for Apple and Nike mostly with the odd thing in between.
I haven’t seen a Nike ad all week , but apple is showing up and tons more ads in asia showing up.
So I’m convinced there’s more ads than usual.
[+] [-] marricks|3 years ago|reply
Also… I think advertisers don’t want to be the spotlight, their job is to make their customers the spotlight. Publicly speaking out is likely a huge faux pas.
[+] [-] vilda|3 years ago|reply
The bigger problem is current recession. Budgets for ads are cut first.
[+] [-] edmundsauto|3 years ago|reply
One thing we will find out - did they return on their own, or did they return because of persistent sales calls from FB and YT? Those are the part of the cuts - Twitter lost some very high profile relationships with brands that spend big. And it's reach/scale rarely justified dedicated campaigns - I'm sure most agencies are happy to not spend 20% of their time on 5% of their reach, compared to G and Meta.
[+] [-] notatoad|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] threeseed|3 years ago|reply
It's purely to do with Twitter not currently being able to run a competitive ad engine. And it ties directly with a large proportion of the engineers and data scientists being let go.
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dorkwood|3 years ago|reply
Is this true? I've seen a lot of big budget ad investment from companies whose stocks have been tanking all year. It almost seems like they're trying to dig themselves out of a hole with marketing.
[+] [-] mrtksn|3 years ago|reply
You can build Twitter clone from scratch without knowing anything about IT at the beginning and learn it on the process but you can't learn much about brands or advertising or marketing except for some high level talks.
I have no idea how so many people can analyse the Twitter ad situation, is everyone well versed in these topics?
[+] [-] kristintynski|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FartyMcFarter|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hombre_fatal|3 years ago|reply
This goes for most corporate discussion on HN where everyone talks with the authority of someone who deals with it daily. Unless you do have those insights, it's not all that interesting to regurgitate what we, the peanut gallery, suspect to be true.
[+] [-] rayiner|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] memish|3 years ago|reply
They broke the deal." https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1595196519598080000
The condition he's referring to is the moderation council he had announced. Apparently they demanded a council, he agreed, announced it, and then they pressured advertisers anyway?
[+] [-] dagmx|3 years ago|reply
Also if they were actually activist, why would they be satisfied with just a moderation council? Surely if they cared about causes enough to agree to not criticize Twitter, they would criticize it for other things that would pop up?
This sounds like Elon didn’t bother setting up a council (there was never proof he tried) and is looking to spin the story now that advertisers are dropping off.
Remember that key advertisers dropped off before he even announced the idea of a council. They even specifically mentioned that his erratic behaviour was part of the reason.
I think Elon is going for the classic “victimhood” play to garner sympathy.
[+] [-] Robotbeat|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jhp123|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lawn|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anonu|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rconti|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dreadlordbone|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hexis|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] boringg|3 years ago|reply
I think this thing is going to turn around in 3 months if it makes through these rocky waters. Whether the product is the same and we like it TBD
[+] [-] root_axis|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skmurphy|3 years ago|reply
I definitely hope that Twitter can find a better business model than advertising, which I think is fee for service. That has always been the best way, especially for social media. All the disinformation, the serotonin economy, the harassment, the impersonation–ALL the ills are reduced with a fee for service model.
[+] [-] 4v0v|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ncko|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] psadri|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 28304283409234|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] luxuryballs|3 years ago|reply