Incidentally, I’ve been seeing more ads than ever before on Twitter. There’s a promoted tweet every four tweets in my timeline. I’m pretty sure this is more than it was previously. It’s annoying!
I am not not using one. On iOS Safari, with both firefox focus and wipr blocking content, the “promoted tweets” are not blocked. But the ads on every other site are.
That means little for the long term. What happens, is many companies do such things to "make a story of it" to appease some advertising base, and then quietly when no on is looking, or cares, in a few months companies quietly re-allocate budget back to such media channels.
If Musk is upset over losing $4M/day, then losing 1/4 the revenue stream for 3 months should be significant. He cut HC to help pay for the interest on the purchase loan, cut revenue for 3+ months. In the process, he fired the very people who might be able to coax advertisers to return.
That sounds to me like a flywheel of failure or a death spiral, self-inflicted.
Yeah, but isn’t the issue a long term problem now? If he is committed to little/no moderation, when would things change in a direction that would bring advertisers back?
If he wants a free speech free for all ala 4chan, he’s going to have to find an entirely new way to monetize that doesn’t rely on ads.
This theory is that rather than the change itself driving advertises away, it's outrage about the change that's driving them away. In which case they could be expected to only stay away for as long as the outrage persists.
I’m saying as long as brands can’t be guaranteed their ads won’t regularly show up next to horrific things, they won’t come back. Especially since they weren’t great To be fun with, having significantly smaller numbers of advertisers than their competitors.
Advertisers could just be pausing till the dust settles - which it eventually will. The faltering economy also is a good reason for advertisers to take this opportunity to revisit their ad spend. This could just be temporary, the next couple months will be telling. Until then it is premature to call advertising on Twitter dead