7 ms·

>Media buyers did ask those questions. Twitter had zero answers or assurances, the presentation imploded and ended shockingly early. I'm very curious what sort

by Imnimo 4y ago

>Media buyers did ask those questions. Twitter had zero answers or assurances, the presentation imploded and ended shockingly early. I'm very curious what sort of questions these were.

CharlesW 4y ago
Here's some good background: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/01/opinion/elon-musk-twitter-advertisers.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/01/opinion/elon-musk-twitter... (archive: https://archive.ph/IZp4P https://archive.ph/IZp4P) Elon himself said that Twitter "cannot become a free-for-all hellscape", and so advertisers want to understand exactly what the plan is to avoid that given that (for example) Elon laid off 75% of the moderation team. Pre-Elon, leadership spent lots of cycles building trust and confidence with advertisers, involving them in policy discussions, etc. That is not only no longer happening, but it appears that Elon is blocking people who are asking tough questions. https://twitter.com/loupas/status/1588599808587345921 https://twitter.com/loupas/status/1588599808587345921 For anyone confused about motivations, this isn't about "wokeism" but is straight capitalism. In the same way that airlines don't want their ads to be placed next to coverage of an air disaster, advertisers and agencies need assurances that Twitter isn't on the road to becoming a cesspool, and that their brand/ads won't appear near harmful content.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- rajin444 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - cma 4y ago
    Antisemitism and other overt racism go beyond "not woke."
    - pmoriarty 4y ago
      Not to mention endless calls to violence, some of which are actually acted on by these "not woke" people.
      - cvwright 4y ago
        Agreed that this is a problem. But there have been calls to violence on Twitter for a long time. Just in Portland, we had 100 days of street violence, a prolonged attempt to burn down a federal courthouse, various attacks on the city mayor, and the attempted murder of a gay immigrant journalist. It wasn’t hard at the time to find Tweets planning and celebrating all of this stuff. If it’s truly about violence, why are the advertisers just now getting cold feet?
        BryantD 4y ago
        You might want to examine your priors. What if the issues you see as symptomatic of wide-spread left wing violence don't look the same way when when considered in the cold light of maximizing advertising dollars?
        fragmede 4y ago
        It's about looks more than it is actual violence. This is advertising so that's not throwing shade, it really is actually about looks. It's also about actual violence, but looks here are very important. And it looked like Twitter was doing something about the violence. Maybe not 100% successfully, but they were trying, and officially disavowed doxxing and violence.
        x0x0 4y ago
        Multiple reasons: Musk spent a bunch of time bashing twitter's moderation efforts pre purchase. He's then spent a bunch of time mocking advertisers' wish for brand safety [1]. He chased that with calls to harass advertisers who stop advertising on Twitter [2,3]. For context, Twitter has never had a particularly compelling ads product. Like it or not, both FB and Google have super compelling products: the best (by far) tracking, targeting, cross-device linking, or intent. eg Facebook could match your user across devices, browsers, and apps; and allowed ecom targeting by phone or address, not just pixels or cookies. Google has a near-monopoly on the highest-intent ads next to their searches. That's why, in 2021, Google earned $209B from ads, FB $115B from ads, and Twitter < $5B from ads. Add that up with Musk's ... compelling offer to whip his followers into a rage at you if you, say, reduce ad spend allocation to Twitter in your quarterly ad rebalancing, and it's not hard to see how we got where we are. [1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1587899771091566595 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1587899771091566595 [2] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1588676939463946241 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1588676939463946241 [3] https://twitter.com/GoAngelo/status/1588696580709924866 https://twitter.com/GoAngelo/status/1588696580709924866
- pmoriarty 4y ago
  "Elon laid off 75% of the moderation team." Did he? According to this BBC article[1], "Yoel Roth, Twitter's Head of Safety & Integrity, said that most of the more than 2,000 content moderators working on "front-line review" were not impacted" by the firings. More details here[2], where Roth says "More than 80% of our incoming content moderation volume was completely unaffected by this access change. The daily volume of moderation actions we take stayed steady through this period." [1] - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-63524219 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-63524219 [2] - https://nitter.net/yoyoel/status/1588657229628321792 https://nitter.net/yoyoel/status/1588657229628321792
  - snoopy_telex 4y ago
    Wait. So of the ~3500 employees left at the company, 2000 are content moderators?!
    - detaro 4y ago
      I wouldn't be surprised if a good chunk of them aren't Twitter employees, but subcontractors somewhere. At least that's what plenty other social media sites do.
    - majewsky 4y ago
      Well yeah, what else about Twitter would require that much raw manpower?
      - Kye 4y ago
        Ad sales, advertising relationship management, ad analytics for those relationships.
    - peanuty1 4y ago
      Isn't content moderation the biggest challenge at Twitter?
    - pessimizer 4y ago
      We've created a new class, of tens of thousands of people all over the world, who spend all day censoring content in realtime. Eventually there will be giant censorship service corporations lobbying government for more restrictions on speech, and for them to be more complicated and confusing (to make them more difficult to in-house.)
- marvin 4y ago
  Hmmm, wonder if it’s a freedom of speech issue if a coalition of companies effectively prevent public discussion of issues that might significantly upset the status quo? Loud, blatant lies that are repeated by authority figures continuously is one thing. That this is bad is almost universally agreed on. But does this advertiser worry really stop at that? I think this is a very interesting question, hitting at the heart of the Twitter controversy. Advertisers have an incredibly strong influence on contemporary discourse; their concerns influence almost all publicly-visible discussion, opinion and debate. The attention economy, eyeball-and-click-hunting is just the tip of the spear, and this dominates almost every public communication platform in the world. Elon Musk and his $44 billion «fuck this shit» purchase is the only significant challenge to this model. It will obviously upset the advertisers; it’s tautological. Maybe the result is that it won’t work, but if it does, Twitter will be the only public communications platform that isn’t very heavily influenced by advertisers’ interests.
  - MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
    He who pays the fiddler, calls the tune. Want to broadcast whatever you want? Fine, pay for it. Want advertisers to subsidize your costs? Don't be surprised that their money comes with strings attached.
    - marvin 4y ago
      Judging by the downvotes, I don't think I'm getting my point across. Absolutely every fiddler that currently has an audience of non-negligible size is paid by a consortium of advertisers that have aligning interests. The strings, so to speak, all pull in the same direction. This is largely invisible, since everyone must play by these rules. TV, newspapers, social media. Audience of 5 billion. We do complain about polarization, clickbait, negative emotion amplification and dark patterns a lot, but we accept it as the economic laws of gravity. Shareholder duty cements this. It molds our entire society. Elon Musk has removed Twitter from this regime, by burning 20 billion dollars and stating a willingness to burn the remaining 24. Assuming he can make the economics work out, Twitter will be the only global media platform that doesn't have to bow to the advertisers' every whim. A lot of the contention comes from the fact that if this succeeds, Twitter will no longer have to follow the moderation- and censorship rules that advertisers have quietly implemented everywhere else. This might apply to the extremes that the majority want to censor (whether sensibly or not), but it also applies to lots of discourse that vocal minorities wants to censor. Regardless of whether one likes this development, it's super interesting.
- cauthon 4y ago
  > In the same way that airlines don't want their ads to be placed next to coverage of an air disaster, advertisers and agencies need assurances that Twitter isn't on the road to becoming a cesspool, and that their brand/ads won't appear near harmful content. Yep. How many major companies do you recall advertising on 4chan?
  - technion 4y ago
    That question was discussed on 4chan itself recently. I believe the suggestion was that twitter will be saved by onahole retailers and pirate anime streams. There's also that one guy that buys ads for his own Spotify playlist. That certainly won't sustain twitter but it's a humorous future to think about for the org.
    - disgruntledphd2 4y ago
      If they can deliver a profitable DR platform they'll be fine. Sounds like they haven't done that yet though, if the upfronts are this big a deal.
- Aunche 4y ago
  > advertisers and agencies need assurances that Twitter isn't on the road to becoming a cesspool, and that their brand/ads won't appear near harmful content. The underlying assumption is that slackivists will actually put their money where their mouth is. The Chick-fil-A boycotts did absolutely nothing to their sales and I suspect the same would be true for any company that people call out for advertising on Twitter. I seriously doubt that there are very many consumers will genuinely care where a company allocates its advertising dollars. I'm actually politically left, but the reason I care is that I hope that this forces the left to actually act outside of being angry on the internet. As much as I disagree with conservatives, I have to applaud that they actually take meaningful political action (e.g. volunteer as poll watchers because they believe in election fraud).
  - mijamo 4y ago
    I don't think you understand. This has nothing to do with activists. Companies already did not want to advertise on controversial content 40 years ago. You don't see Rolex advertising on The Sun (and no, it's not only about demographics, plenty of upper class people read tabloids). Brand image is extremely important. You most definitely do not want most brands appearing close to shitty content. You have the same thing with physical advertising where brands will refuse their ads in some places if the perception of the space is too bad (ex: homeless people around, drug traffic...). The reason is that even if you might be interested with the brand you will now associate it with the environment you were presented it with. Of course for Lidl it is less of a worry, but even low price brands have standards and don't want to be anywhere near a nazy content.

by Imnimo 4y ago

>Media buyers did ask those questions. Twitter had zero answers or assurances, the presentation imploded and ended shockingly early. I'm very curious what sort of questions these were.

CharlesW 4y ago

Here's some good background: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/01/opinion/elon-musk-twitter-advertisers.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/01/opinion/elon-musk-twitter... (archive: https://archive.ph/IZp4P https://archive.ph/IZp4P) Elon himself said that Twitter "cannot become a free-for-all hellscape", and so advertisers want to understand exactly what the plan is to avoid that given that (for example) Elon laid off 75% of the moderation team. Pre-Elon, leadership spent lots of cycles building trust and confidence with advertisers, involving them in policy discussions, etc. That is not only no longer happening, but it appears that Elon is blocking people who are asking tough questions. https://twitter.com/loupas/status/1588599808587345921 https://twitter.com/loupas/status/1588599808587345921 For anyone confused about motivations, this isn't about "wokeism" but is straight capitalism. In the same way that airlines don't want their ads to be placed next to coverage of an air disaster, advertisers and agencies need assurances that Twitter isn't on the road to becoming a cesspool, and that their brand/ads won't appear near harmful content.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
rajin444 4y ago
[flagged]
- cma 4y ago
  Antisemitism and other overt racism go beyond "not woke."
  - pmoriarty 4y ago
    Not to mention endless calls to violence, some of which are actually acted on by these "not woke" people.
    - cvwright 4y ago
      Agreed that this is a problem. But there have been calls to violence on Twitter for a long time. Just in Portland, we had 100 days of street violence, a prolonged attempt to burn down a federal courthouse, various attacks on the city mayor, and the attempted murder of a gay immigrant journalist. It wasn’t hard at the time to find Tweets planning and celebrating all of this stuff. If it’s truly about violence, why are the advertisers just now getting cold feet?
      - BryantD 4y ago
        You might want to examine your priors. What if the issues you see as symptomatic of wide-spread left wing violence don't look the same way when when considered in the cold light of maximizing advertising dollars?
      - fragmede 4y ago
        It's about looks more than it is actual violence. This is advertising so that's not throwing shade, it really is actually about looks. It's also about actual violence, but looks here are very important. And it looked like Twitter was doing something about the violence. Maybe not 100% successfully, but they were trying, and officially disavowed doxxing and violence.
      - x0x0 4y ago
        Multiple reasons: Musk spent a bunch of time bashing twitter's moderation efforts pre purchase. He's then spent a bunch of time mocking advertisers' wish for brand safety [1]. He chased that with calls to harass advertisers who stop advertising on Twitter [2,3]. For context, Twitter has never had a particularly compelling ads product. Like it or not, both FB and Google have super compelling products: the best (by far) tracking, targeting, cross-device linking, or intent. eg Facebook could match your user across devices, browsers, and apps; and allowed ecom targeting by phone or address, not just pixels or cookies. Google has a near-monopoly on the highest-intent ads next to their searches. That's why, in 2021, Google earned $209B from ads, FB $115B from ads, and Twitter < $5B from ads. Add that up with Musk's ... compelling offer to whip his followers into a rage at you if you, say, reduce ad spend allocation to Twitter in your quarterly ad rebalancing, and it's not hard to see how we got where we are. [1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1587899771091566595 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1587899771091566595 [2] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1588676939463946241 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1588676939463946241 [3] https://twitter.com/GoAngelo/status/1588696580709924866 https://twitter.com/GoAngelo/status/1588696580709924866
pmoriarty 4y ago
"Elon laid off 75% of the moderation team." Did he? According to this BBC article[1], "Yoel Roth, Twitter's Head of Safety & Integrity, said that most of the more than 2,000 content moderators working on "front-line review" were not impacted" by the firings. More details here[2], where Roth says "More than 80% of our incoming content moderation volume was completely unaffected by this access change. The daily volume of moderation actions we take stayed steady through this period." [1] - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-63524219 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-63524219 [2] - https://nitter.net/yoyoel/status/1588657229628321792 https://nitter.net/yoyoel/status/1588657229628321792
- snoopy_telex 4y ago
  Wait. So of the ~3500 employees left at the company, 2000 are content moderators?!
  - detaro 4y ago
    I wouldn't be surprised if a good chunk of them aren't Twitter employees, but subcontractors somewhere. At least that's what plenty other social media sites do.
  - majewsky 4y ago
    Well yeah, what else about Twitter would require that much raw manpower?
    - Kye 4y ago
      Ad sales, advertising relationship management, ad analytics for those relationships.
  - peanuty1 4y ago
    Isn't content moderation the biggest challenge at Twitter?
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    We've created a new class, of tens of thousands of people all over the world, who spend all day censoring content in realtime. Eventually there will be giant censorship service corporations lobbying government for more restrictions on speech, and for them to be more complicated and confusing (to make them more difficult to in-house.)
marvin 4y ago
Hmmm, wonder if it’s a freedom of speech issue if a coalition of companies effectively prevent public discussion of issues that might significantly upset the status quo? Loud, blatant lies that are repeated by authority figures continuously is one thing. That this is bad is almost universally agreed on. But does this advertiser worry really stop at that? I think this is a very interesting question, hitting at the heart of the Twitter controversy. Advertisers have an incredibly strong influence on contemporary discourse; their concerns influence almost all publicly-visible discussion, opinion and debate. The attention economy, eyeball-and-click-hunting is just the tip of the spear, and this dominates almost every public communication platform in the world. Elon Musk and his $44 billion «fuck this shit» purchase is the only significant challenge to this model. It will obviously upset the advertisers; it’s tautological. Maybe the result is that it won’t work, but if it does, Twitter will be the only public communications platform that isn’t very heavily influenced by advertisers’ interests.
- MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
  He who pays the fiddler, calls the tune. Want to broadcast whatever you want? Fine, pay for it. Want advertisers to subsidize your costs? Don't be surprised that their money comes with strings attached.
  - marvin 4y ago
    Judging by the downvotes, I don't think I'm getting my point across. Absolutely every fiddler that currently has an audience of non-negligible size is paid by a consortium of advertisers that have aligning interests. The strings, so to speak, all pull in the same direction. This is largely invisible, since everyone must play by these rules. TV, newspapers, social media. Audience of 5 billion. We do complain about polarization, clickbait, negative emotion amplification and dark patterns a lot, but we accept it as the economic laws of gravity. Shareholder duty cements this. It molds our entire society. Elon Musk has removed Twitter from this regime, by burning 20 billion dollars and stating a willingness to burn the remaining 24. Assuming he can make the economics work out, Twitter will be the only global media platform that doesn't have to bow to the advertisers' every whim. A lot of the contention comes from the fact that if this succeeds, Twitter will no longer have to follow the moderation- and censorship rules that advertisers have quietly implemented everywhere else. This might apply to the extremes that the majority want to censor (whether sensibly or not), but it also applies to lots of discourse that vocal minorities wants to censor. Regardless of whether one likes this development, it's super interesting.
cauthon 4y ago
> In the same way that airlines don't want their ads to be placed next to coverage of an air disaster, advertisers and agencies need assurances that Twitter isn't on the road to becoming a cesspool, and that their brand/ads won't appear near harmful content. Yep. How many major companies do you recall advertising on 4chan?
- technion 4y ago
  That question was discussed on 4chan itself recently. I believe the suggestion was that twitter will be saved by onahole retailers and pirate anime streams. There's also that one guy that buys ads for his own Spotify playlist. That certainly won't sustain twitter but it's a humorous future to think about for the org.
  - disgruntledphd2 4y ago
    If they can deliver a profitable DR platform they'll be fine. Sounds like they haven't done that yet though, if the upfronts are this big a deal.
Aunche 4y ago
> advertisers and agencies need assurances that Twitter isn't on the road to becoming a cesspool, and that their brand/ads won't appear near harmful content. The underlying assumption is that slackivists will actually put their money where their mouth is. The Chick-fil-A boycotts did absolutely nothing to their sales and I suspect the same would be true for any company that people call out for advertising on Twitter. I seriously doubt that there are very many consumers will genuinely care where a company allocates its advertising dollars. I'm actually politically left, but the reason I care is that I hope that this forces the left to actually act outside of being angry on the internet. As much as I disagree with conservatives, I have to applaud that they actually take meaningful political action (e.g. volunteer as poll watchers because they believe in election fraud).
- mijamo 4y ago
  I don't think you understand. This has nothing to do with activists. Companies already did not want to advertise on controversial content 40 years ago. You don't see Rolex advertising on The Sun (and no, it's not only about demographics, plenty of upper class people read tabloids). Brand image is extremely important. You most definitely do not want most brands appearing close to shitty content. You have the same thing with physical advertising where brands will refuse their ads in some places if the perception of the space is too bad (ex: homeless people around, drug traffic...). The reason is that even if you might be interested with the brand you will now associate it with the environment you were presented it with. Of course for Lidl it is less of a worry, but even low price brands have standards and don't want to be anywhere near a nazy content.