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> with seeming negligible external-facing impact on the core product. Twitter is said to have lost $2.5 Billion/year in advertiser money, largely because Twitt

> with seeming negligible external-facing impact on the core product. Twitter is said to have lost $2.5 Billion/year in advertiser money, largely because Twitter's sales teams have not been returning emails from worried Advertisers. That's a pretty huge impact on Twitter's #1 revenue stream (estimated to be $5 Billion in 2021). Twitter's core product is advertisements. Without sales staff to keep the advertisers, they're clearly losing a ton of money. Advertising was always degenerating. I know that over the past year, I've been seeing more and more pornographic material in Twitter, and I'm pretty sure advertisers don't like that kind of stuff. But instead of having teams working out those kinks (pun intended), those teams have been simply fired. So advertisers know that there's no hope for these issues to be fixed anymore, and are now leaving the platform. There's simply not enough developers left to change Twitter or combat the rise of unsavory material. --------- There's been many a blogpost about "Airline advertiser didn't want to have its ads appear next to Airline disasters". (Ex: Southwest's shutdowns cause thousands of flight cancellations, it will be talked about on Twitter... does Southwest want its advertisements being shown next to that??). These are the kinds of things that Twitter's teams worked to prevent. You know, mundane issues but require _constant_ coding to identify as news events cause a rapid change to the online discussion. And its fair: there's no reason why Southwest's advertisements should be shown in a negative light... or for Southwest to be paying for that kind of negative publicity.

adam_arthur 4y ago
Interesting that Twitter is shipping features faster than ever after 80% layoffs. Don't think Twitter's revenue issues have anything to do with sales staff. Advertising channels/campaigns can and should be 100% automated.
- dragontamer 4y ago
  But not the features that retain advertisers. Which were the silent issues that no one talked about before. And indeed, advertisers aren't talking about it now. They're just leaving the platform in droves. There's no one _to_ talk about it with. Entire teams (including high ranking executives) that kept relationships with advertisers have been fired. Twitter doesn't even have anyone answering / categorizing the complaints anymore. > Don't think Twitter's revenue issues have anything to do with sales staff. Advertising channels/campaigns can and should be 100% automated. You can't automate news. News is constantly changing. Advertisers _constantly_ are complaining about "X is being shown next to Y news event. Please stop that", and its impossible to predict X, or Y.
  - adam_arthur 4y ago
    Advertisers dropped spending because they don't like Elon/his behavior. Not because sales staff were laid off. It's quite obvious to anybody looking at the situation objectively. Twitter has functioned fine after massive layoffs, and feature velocity has only accelerated. Too many developers have an inflated sense of self importance
    - dragontamer 4y ago
      > Not because sales staff were laid off. There's plenty of advertisers who have blogged about "My emails to Twitter stopped getting answered" around the time of the 75% layoffs. This is well documented. What do you want the advertisers to do? To just keep giving money to Twitter even when all their contacts have disappeared? There's some pretty basic behaviors that have nothing to do with politics here that Twitter is failing at.
      - adam_arthur 4y ago
        If I were an advertiser (and I have in the past), I would look at the metrics of engagement for my ads to assess their efficacy, not talk to a representative. Either you're happy with the revenue lift or you're not. To say that ad sales has to be a manual, high touch channel is simply wrong. Perhaps you have staff on hand for large accounts, but why would e-commerce drop shipping headphone company #7 need to talk to a human?
        dragontamer 4y ago
        I'm talking about the $100+ Million advertisers, not small ones like you. Disney is most interested in making sure that Mickey Mouse / Winnie the Pooh / Zootopia is not accidentally shown next to furry porn. Southwest doesn't want its ads shown next to airplane disasters. Kellogs doesn't want "Itsssss GREAT" being shown next to the Ukrainian War. As I said before: you can't predict the "X is being shown next to Y, please stop that" problem. Its impossible to predict X, its impossible to predict Y. You just gotta have email lines with these big companies and promptly issue your programmers / machine learning / data scientists the new algorithms to keep advertisers happy. ------- Twitter is 100% the grounds where furry porn, Airplane Disasters, and Ukrainian War disasters are constantly being discussed and shared. Advertisers want protection of their brand, despite the online discourse.
- objclxt 4y ago
  > Interesting that Twitter is shipping features faster than ever after 80% layoffs. I don't know if deliberately breaking their developer API for third party clients counts as "shipping features faster than ever".
  - astrange 4y ago
    They also put back the "for you" tab to force people into algorithmic timelines, which they already tried once and pulled back since everyone hated it.
  - adam_arthur 4y ago
    They obviously did that because the API is not benefiting them at all from a revenue perspective. If it were, they wouldn't have gotten rid of it. Twitter was run as a charity prior to the acquisition. Just as many VC fat tech companies were
    - pwinnski 4y ago
      This is "obviously" based on... no communication whatsoever from the company yet. Another comment of yours says "quite obvious" about advertising, which doesn't seem to be an industry segment in which you work. It seems your observations are right in line with Twitter's new owner, to whom everything that's happened over the last few months has also been "obvious," and mostly wrong.
      - adam_arthur 4y ago
        Yes, Elon who made Tesla and SpaceX some of the largest companies in the world in just a few years, and likely many more over the next two decades is a totally incompetent buffoon. I’d rather take his side than the small minded and intellectually weak detractors. Just because things tend to be a certain way, doesn’t make it optimal or right. Evidence, all of history where bad practices were pervasive and common and later usurped by better practices. Maybe use forethought and critical thinking rather than credentialism and groupthink
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- jwilber 4y ago
  Twitter has been objectively worse since the layoffs. I get tons of sex-bot accounts liking my posts that never existed before, the app constantly refreshes itself, there’s a few second loading message every time I view my timeline that didn’t exist beforehand, and my timeline is much worse than before (instead of seeing mostly tech stuff in the area of my interest, 60% has become fluff akin to my instagram story rec’s).
  - artificialLimbs 4y ago
    Opposite experience here. I've had almost 0 porn spammers as opposed to at least weekly before.
  - kfarr 4y ago
    For me it's the crypto bots. Out of control. Stopped looking at notifications for a while because it was always randos pumping air drops and nfts
- HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago
  > Interesting that Twitter is shipping features faster than ever after 80% layoffs Desperation from the remaining devs? I mean, I can crank out crap as fast as anyone wants me to if it doesn't have to work right.
  - bg24 4y ago
    Another approach to look at this: - They are experimenting more aggressively. - Depends on what features you build and time that it take to build those. - How much can you afford to delay the tech debt. When the CEO is focused on rolling out features faster, everyone rallies behind. Does it mean the company is operating great. End of 2023 will be a good indicator. Also note that recent tooling around LLMs (eg. ChatGPT) will improve aggregate efficiency.
- pwinnski 4y ago
  So far every new feature has been a previously-developed canceled feature. Even Twitter Blue was an existing feature repurposed, and it took two tries to release.
- vkou 4y ago
  > Interesting that Twitter is shipping features faster than ever after 80% layoffs. Do we have an independent source that doesn't have a history of dishonesty confirming this? Does it have a creative definition of 'shipping', 'feature', and 'faster'? Are there any long-tail dangers that have, or have the potential to blow up in Twitter's face from it? My car goes faster and gets better MPG ever since I stripped out the weight of the braking system...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
vt85 4y ago
[dead]
colechristensen 4y ago
> So advertisers know that there's no hope for these issues to be fixed anymore, and are now leaving the platform. Having worked in adtech for a while the more likely scenario is that lots of companies have turned off their ad spend. That isn’t “leaving”, ad spend is volatile coming and going with many motivations is not uncommon. Pausing your campaigns because the ad publisher is a bit broken isn’t permanent. And whatever is “said” isn’t to be trusted, you won’t get real numbers from a private company and rumors. No doubt there was a big dip around the takeover, but the only thing I’ve heard is a few people complaining about the increased number of ads. Probably some advertiser tools were broken and the people who’d been talking to those advertisers had been fired, but those are all temporary. Advertisers aren’t going to take some great moral stand unless there’s a clear reason that can be traced back to customers, disliking elon isn’t one of those things.
- pavlov 4y ago
  > “Probably some advertiser tools were broken and the people who’d been talking to those advertisers had been fired, but those are all temporary.” How is that temporary if — as it appears — the new management has fired the engineering teams which developed the ad tools, and also has no intentions of hiring more people to replace those ad sales teams?
  - colechristensen 4y ago
    Is it not obvious? Are you suggesting that Twitter is not going to have developers work on ad tools any longer? Are you suggesting that sales and customer relations for advertisers are just no longer going to be jobs that anyone does and Twitter is going to just hope and pray they get ad money? Yes lots of reorganization happens, lots of jobs were lost, but, duh, the work is still going to be done, even if there is a re-org gap.
    - pavlov 4y ago
      And when do you think that’s going to happen? The new owner seems fundamentally uninterested in selling ads or hiring anyone who knows how that world works. Instead he’s hoping to turn it into a subscription service that also gets a cut of user-to-user payments made on the platform.
yalogin 4y ago
Advertising revenue fell because of Elon's new "extreme right wing beyond conspiracy theories" stance. It is not because of the sales staff not responding to emails.
- heywhatupboys 4y ago
  > Elon's new "extreme right wing beyond conspiracy theories" stance wow that sounds insane? I wish you would have had a source attached to this (an actual source btw, not some online journalist writing an opinion piece)
  - cmorgan31 4y ago
    You are asking for the impossible. It would take a fiscal quarter for a source that isn’t an opinion. Perhaps the OP should not include Elon’s insane approach to content moderation as a new stance but simple negligence by the adtech strategy they’ve devised. In either case Elon’s going to need to adjust in some capacity or adopt the chum ad approach to monetize his content.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - KerrAvon 4y ago
    Just read his Twitter feed. He has repeatedly retweeted (source: his own Twitter account) not only right-wing memes like QAnon stuff, but antisemitic ones. I will then direct you to Popehat's Rule of Goats should you need it.
  - sleepybrett 4y ago
    Look at who elon has banned and who has has chosen to unban or not ban. It's pretty simple math.
- bushbaba 4y ago
  Doubtful. Especially when large clients of twitter have publicly stated the reason for their reduced ad budget is lack of support and bad, for brand, content next to their ads.
rewtraw 4y ago
Anecdotally, over the past few weeks the quality of ads I see on Twitter has deteriorated sharply. I used to primarily get ads from well known brands, but now I'm seeing ads for random products like rat traps.
- syngrog66 4y ago
  rat traps: me too. the bucket with the trick plate dropping them down? over the past 2 to 3 weeks the ads shown to me have gotten more and more small fish, bottom of barrel, and wildly unfitting for me. and weird. its easy to predict the ones I'm seeing are by advertisers bidding much lower $ than the previous average. reasonable to extrapolate and predict Twitter's advertising income has likely crashed. I've heard from enough other people all experiencing the same shift over the same period
- honkler 4y ago
  I've been only seeing crypto-shilling and sports betting.
- hgomersall 4y ago
  Interesting. How do you see ads on Twitter?
ctoth 4y ago
> there's no reason why Southwest's advertisements should be shown in a negative light.. So basically there's been a team suppressing any really bad news about any company who advertises on Twitter? Am I reading that right? And you want them back?
- RheingoldRiver 4y ago
  I don't think it's that necessarily; instead, you could pause Southwest advertisements until the next news cycle for example, or look for keywords in tweets and avoid showing SW ads near such tweets (e.g. normally you want a SW ad near tweets with "airport" but for the next 5 days you want the opposite approach)
- lukevp 4y ago
  No, I don’t think you read that correctly. The thing that’s removed is the advertisement, not the news. Eg if I tweeted “HackerNews sucks”, they would not want to pay to advertise on or near my tweet. They would rather advertise in a more neutral or positive space. Someone else could fill that advertising slot (eg. McDonald’s).
- blueelephanttea 4y ago
  I mean you are very clearly not reading it right since the commenter's comment had nothing to do with suppressing news and only had to do with where paid advertisements are placed.
- kradroy 4y ago
  You have it the wrong way around. The advertiser will ask for the ads to be suppressed or removed from negative contexts, because that's part of the service they pay for.
- aetherson 4y ago
  That's not what your parent said: they said when there's any really bad news about a company who advertises on Twitter, that company doesn't want its ads shown right next to that news.

adam_arthur 4y ago

Interesting that Twitter is shipping features faster than ever after 80% layoffs. Don't think Twitter's revenue issues have anything to do with sales staff. Advertising channels/campaigns can and should be 100% automated.

dragontamer 4y ago
But not the features that retain advertisers. Which were the silent issues that no one talked about before. And indeed, advertisers aren't talking about it now. They're just leaving the platform in droves. There's no one _to_ talk about it with. Entire teams (including high ranking executives) that kept relationships with advertisers have been fired. Twitter doesn't even have anyone answering / categorizing the complaints anymore. > Don't think Twitter's revenue issues have anything to do with sales staff. Advertising channels/campaigns can and should be 100% automated. You can't automate news. News is constantly changing. Advertisers _constantly_ are complaining about "X is being shown next to Y news event. Please stop that", and its impossible to predict X, or Y.
- adam_arthur 4y ago
  Advertisers dropped spending because they don't like Elon/his behavior. Not because sales staff were laid off. It's quite obvious to anybody looking at the situation objectively. Twitter has functioned fine after massive layoffs, and feature velocity has only accelerated. Too many developers have an inflated sense of self importance
  - dragontamer 4y ago
    > Not because sales staff were laid off. There's plenty of advertisers who have blogged about "My emails to Twitter stopped getting answered" around the time of the 75% layoffs. This is well documented. What do you want the advertisers to do? To just keep giving money to Twitter even when all their contacts have disappeared? There's some pretty basic behaviors that have nothing to do with politics here that Twitter is failing at.
    - adam_arthur 4y ago
      If I were an advertiser (and I have in the past), I would look at the metrics of engagement for my ads to assess their efficacy, not talk to a representative. Either you're happy with the revenue lift or you're not. To say that ad sales has to be a manual, high touch channel is simply wrong. Perhaps you have staff on hand for large accounts, but why would e-commerce drop shipping headphone company #7 need to talk to a human?
      - dragontamer 4y ago
        I'm talking about the $100+ Million advertisers, not small ones like you. Disney is most interested in making sure that Mickey Mouse / Winnie the Pooh / Zootopia is not accidentally shown next to furry porn. Southwest doesn't want its ads shown next to airplane disasters. Kellogs doesn't want "Itsssss GREAT" being shown next to the Ukrainian War. As I said before: you can't predict the "X is being shown next to Y, please stop that" problem. Its impossible to predict X, its impossible to predict Y. You just gotta have email lines with these big companies and promptly issue your programmers / machine learning / data scientists the new algorithms to keep advertisers happy. ------- Twitter is 100% the grounds where furry porn, Airplane Disasters, and Ukrainian War disasters are constantly being discussed and shared. Advertisers want protection of their brand, despite the online discourse.
objclxt 4y ago
> Interesting that Twitter is shipping features faster than ever after 80% layoffs. I don't know if deliberately breaking their developer API for third party clients counts as "shipping features faster than ever".
- astrange 4y ago
  They also put back the "for you" tab to force people into algorithmic timelines, which they already tried once and pulled back since everyone hated it.
- adam_arthur 4y ago
  They obviously did that because the API is not benefiting them at all from a revenue perspective. If it were, they wouldn't have gotten rid of it. Twitter was run as a charity prior to the acquisition. Just as many VC fat tech companies were
  - pwinnski 4y ago
    This is "obviously" based on... no communication whatsoever from the company yet. Another comment of yours says "quite obvious" about advertising, which doesn't seem to be an industry segment in which you work. It seems your observations are right in line with Twitter's new owner, to whom everything that's happened over the last few months has also been "obvious," and mostly wrong.
    - adam_arthur 4y ago
      Yes, Elon who made Tesla and SpaceX some of the largest companies in the world in just a few years, and likely many more over the next two decades is a totally incompetent buffoon. I’d rather take his side than the small minded and intellectually weak detractors. Just because things tend to be a certain way, doesn’t make it optimal or right. Evidence, all of history where bad practices were pervasive and common and later usurped by better practices. Maybe use forethought and critical thinking rather than credentialism and groupthink
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jwilber 4y ago
Twitter has been objectively worse since the layoffs. I get tons of sex-bot accounts liking my posts that never existed before, the app constantly refreshes itself, there’s a few second loading message every time I view my timeline that didn’t exist beforehand, and my timeline is much worse than before (instead of seeing mostly tech stuff in the area of my interest, 60% has become fluff akin to my instagram story rec’s).
- artificialLimbs 4y ago
  Opposite experience here. I've had almost 0 porn spammers as opposed to at least weekly before.
- kfarr 4y ago
  For me it's the crypto bots. Out of control. Stopped looking at notifications for a while because it was always randos pumping air drops and nfts
HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago
> Interesting that Twitter is shipping features faster than ever after 80% layoffs Desperation from the remaining devs? I mean, I can crank out crap as fast as anyone wants me to if it doesn't have to work right.
- bg24 4y ago
  Another approach to look at this: - They are experimenting more aggressively. - Depends on what features you build and time that it take to build those. - How much can you afford to delay the tech debt. When the CEO is focused on rolling out features faster, everyone rallies behind. Does it mean the company is operating great. End of 2023 will be a good indicator. Also note that recent tooling around LLMs (eg. ChatGPT) will improve aggregate efficiency.
pwinnski 4y ago
So far every new feature has been a previously-developed canceled feature. Even Twitter Blue was an existing feature repurposed, and it took two tries to release.
vkou 4y ago
> Interesting that Twitter is shipping features faster than ever after 80% layoffs. Do we have an independent source that doesn't have a history of dishonesty confirming this? Does it have a creative definition of 'shipping', 'feature', and 'faster'? Are there any long-tail dangers that have, or have the potential to blow up in Twitter's face from it? My car goes faster and gets better MPG ever since I stripped out the weight of the braking system...
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

vt85 4y ago

[dead]

colechristensen 4y ago

> So advertisers know that there's no hope for these issues to be fixed anymore, and are now leaving the platform. Having worked in adtech for a while the more likely scenario is that lots of companies have turned off their ad spend. That isn’t “leaving”, ad spend is volatile coming and going with many motivations is not uncommon. Pausing your campaigns because the ad publisher is a bit broken isn’t permanent. And whatever is “said” isn’t to be trusted, you won’t get real numbers from a private company and rumors. No doubt there was a big dip around the takeover, but the only thing I’ve heard is a few people complaining about the increased number of ads. Probably some advertiser tools were broken and the people who’d been talking to those advertisers had been fired, but those are all temporary. Advertisers aren’t going to take some great moral stand unless there’s a clear reason that can be traced back to customers, disliking elon isn’t one of those things.

pavlov 4y ago
> “Probably some advertiser tools were broken and the people who’d been talking to those advertisers had been fired, but those are all temporary.” How is that temporary if — as it appears — the new management has fired the engineering teams which developed the ad tools, and also has no intentions of hiring more people to replace those ad sales teams?
- colechristensen 4y ago
  Is it not obvious? Are you suggesting that Twitter is not going to have developers work on ad tools any longer? Are you suggesting that sales and customer relations for advertisers are just no longer going to be jobs that anyone does and Twitter is going to just hope and pray they get ad money? Yes lots of reorganization happens, lots of jobs were lost, but, duh, the work is still going to be done, even if there is a re-org gap.
  - pavlov 4y ago
    And when do you think that’s going to happen? The new owner seems fundamentally uninterested in selling ads or hiring anyone who knows how that world works. Instead he’s hoping to turn it into a subscription service that also gets a cut of user-to-user payments made on the platform.

yalogin 4y ago

Advertising revenue fell because of Elon's new "extreme right wing beyond conspiracy theories" stance. It is not because of the sales staff not responding to emails.

heywhatupboys 4y ago
> Elon's new "extreme right wing beyond conspiracy theories" stance wow that sounds insane? I wish you would have had a source attached to this (an actual source btw, not some online journalist writing an opinion piece)
- cmorgan31 4y ago
  You are asking for the impossible. It would take a fiscal quarter for a source that isn’t an opinion. Perhaps the OP should not include Elon’s insane approach to content moderation as a new stance but simple negligence by the adtech strategy they’ve devised. In either case Elon’s going to need to adjust in some capacity or adopt the chum ad approach to monetize his content.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- KerrAvon 4y ago
  Just read his Twitter feed. He has repeatedly retweeted (source: his own Twitter account) not only right-wing memes like QAnon stuff, but antisemitic ones. I will then direct you to Popehat's Rule of Goats should you need it.
- sleepybrett 4y ago
  Look at who elon has banned and who has has chosen to unban or not ban. It's pretty simple math.
bushbaba 4y ago
Doubtful. Especially when large clients of twitter have publicly stated the reason for their reduced ad budget is lack of support and bad, for brand, content next to their ads.

rewtraw 4y ago

Anecdotally, over the past few weeks the quality of ads I see on Twitter has deteriorated sharply. I used to primarily get ads from well known brands, but now I'm seeing ads for random products like rat traps.

syngrog66 4y ago
rat traps: me too. the bucket with the trick plate dropping them down? over the past 2 to 3 weeks the ads shown to me have gotten more and more small fish, bottom of barrel, and wildly unfitting for me. and weird. its easy to predict the ones I'm seeing are by advertisers bidding much lower $ than the previous average. reasonable to extrapolate and predict Twitter's advertising income has likely crashed. I've heard from enough other people all experiencing the same shift over the same period
honkler 4y ago
I've been only seeing crypto-shilling and sports betting.
hgomersall 4y ago
Interesting. How do you see ads on Twitter?

ctoth 4y ago

> there's no reason why Southwest's advertisements should be shown in a negative light.. So basically there's been a team suppressing any really bad news about any company who advertises on Twitter? Am I reading that right? And you want them back?

RheingoldRiver 4y ago
I don't think it's that necessarily; instead, you could pause Southwest advertisements until the next news cycle for example, or look for keywords in tweets and avoid showing SW ads near such tweets (e.g. normally you want a SW ad near tweets with "airport" but for the next 5 days you want the opposite approach)
lukevp 4y ago
No, I don’t think you read that correctly. The thing that’s removed is the advertisement, not the news. Eg if I tweeted “HackerNews sucks”, they would not want to pay to advertise on or near my tweet. They would rather advertise in a more neutral or positive space. Someone else could fill that advertising slot (eg. McDonald’s).
blueelephanttea 4y ago
I mean you are very clearly not reading it right since the commenter's comment had nothing to do with suppressing news and only had to do with where paid advertisements are placed.
kradroy 4y ago
You have it the wrong way around. The advertiser will ask for the ads to be suppressed or removed from negative contexts, because that's part of the service they pay for.
aetherson 4y ago
That's not what your parent said: they said when there's any really bad news about a company who advertises on Twitter, that company doesn't want its ads shown right next to that news.