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If the ads produce results, then the advertisers will be back as soon as the dust settles. This isn't even a question. Businesses follow the money. If Coke does

If the ads produce results, then the advertisers will be back as soon as the dust settles. This isn't even a question. Businesses follow the money. If Coke doesn't advertise, Pepsi will happily pick up the slack, etc. It's only a question of short term losses until Musk learns to shut his mouth. If it turns out ad money is just being flushed down the drain because most of the views are in fact bots, as I suspect, then Twitter has a whole other challenge.

summerlight 4y ago
Twitter is known to be a weak digital ads platform. By its nature, its format is not very suitable for ads that directly end up to conversions but it's more of brand ads. Brand ads are hard to accurately measure its immediate effectiveness so it's important to get advertiser trusts first. I think the previous leadership was able to convince advertisers to allocate an experimental level of budget with bunch of initiatives on brand safety over several years. But Elon simply blew up the foundation they've built just within a week and now he's blaming "activists" for "advertiser boycotting". But in the reality, it is just a really good justification to pull off advertising budgets from Twitter since it's been largely "experimental" and ad agencies don't want to be blamed for any uncertainties from this leadership change. And you know, everyone want to be as frugal as possible these days and digital ads is a kind of soft budget...
jefftk 4y ago
I think this is mostly not true. The missing ads here are high-end (as advertising goes) brand ads. This isn't the blender you just looked at on Amazon following you around or weird tricks to remove belly fat. These brand advertisers are not just looking for lots of people to see their ads, there are lots of places they could buy that more cheaply, they are looking for prestige, trust, respectability, etc. This is why you see these ads on the NYT but not on gun forums. Ad space on Twitter is worth far more if the advertisers have guarantees about what their ads might be shown next to (and if Twitter has a good reputation).

summerlight 4y ago

Twitter is known to be a weak digital ads platform. By its nature, its format is not very suitable for ads that directly end up to conversions but it's more of brand ads. Brand ads are hard to accurately measure its immediate effectiveness so it's important to get advertiser trusts first. I think the previous leadership was able to convince advertisers to allocate an experimental level of budget with bunch of initiatives on brand safety over several years. But Elon simply blew up the foundation they've built just within a week and now he's blaming "activists" for "advertiser boycotting". But in the reality, it is just a really good justification to pull off advertising budgets from Twitter since it's been largely "experimental" and ad agencies don't want to be blamed for any uncertainties from this leadership change. And you know, everyone want to be as frugal as possible these days and digital ads is a kind of soft budget...

jefftk 4y ago

I think this is mostly not true. The missing ads here are high-end (as advertising goes) brand ads. This isn't the blender you just looked at on Amazon following you around or weird tricks to remove belly fat. These brand advertisers are not just looking for lots of people to see their ads, there are lots of places they could buy that more cheaply, they are looking for prestige, trust, respectability, etc. This is why you see these ads on the NYT but not on gun forums. Ad space on Twitter is worth far more if the advertisers have guarantees about what their ads might be shown next to (and if Twitter has a good reputation).