[_djo_]

That's a fundamentally different situations. YouTube clients are for consumption only, meaning there's no value to YouTube in them and only revenue loss in terms of adverts not being shown. YouTube however does nothing to prevent content creators from using third party tools for creating, editing, uploading, and organising their videos. They'd be crazy too.

Twitter users are a mix of passive consumers and active content creators and the most prolific and high value content creators tend to use third party clients and platforms. Seeing as though those people are the entire reason you have all those returning eyeballs on Twitter for advertisers to monetise in the first place you really want to do everything you can to make their experience as best as it can be.

On top of that, the proportion of Twitter's user base that were using apps like Tweetbot or Twitterrific is by all accounts minuscule, so the impact on overall advertising revenue can't be huge. And given how many of those users appear to have been prolific tweeters whose content attracts others to the platform I'd say it's more than offset. There are also media reports that Tweetbot and Twitterrific had to pay for some API V2.0 features.

There's no way this decision went through a proper business case analysis and was modelled for its impact on revenues. I'm guessing it's just Musk being capricious as usual and having nobody able to push back.