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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 sit

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.
    - luckylion 4y ago
      Twitter didn't have a keyword list to exclude after being in the business for like 20 years? They needed ad buyers to manually contact them and then needed someone to add that with a developer?
      - dragontamer 4y ago
        IIRC, those tools were in an incomplete state before the takeover... but at least they were somewhat working and Twitter's executives were prompt in responding to any issues. But the APIs have been degenerating rapidly after the takeover. When the tools aren't working as expected, the advertisers then emailed Twitter's API teams. All of those teams have been dismantled, the executives have been fired. With no one left to contact, the advertisers have begun to leave.
        luckylion 4y ago
        That's wild. Why is ad buying such a mess? Google's setup felt extremely outdated last I had to work with it. Is it just largely ignored because it's assumed that most buyers will work with some agency / platform that will integrate with the API and provide a better UI?
    - TigeriusKirk 4y ago
      Southwest and Disney continue to advertise on Twitter, so I assume they're satisfied with the tools in place.
JumpCrisscross 4y ago
> Twitter has functioned fine after massive layoffs, and feature velocity has only accelerated Feature velocity for users. Not customers. Also, the deprecation of APIs strongly intimates Twitter Blue was a failure.
- sleepybrett 4y ago
  > Also, the deprecation of APIs ... and has driven away, or may drive away, many of the core content providers for their network effects. People who buy a third party client for twitter are generally not casual users. I reached out to a few friends I would consider 'posters' a couple of journos, a couple of 'personal brand' advertiser types... all of their twitter engagement is way down .. from both sides of the conversation. Two of them are now in a 'mostly I just post now' mode. Having conversations has become to hard. The other two are struggling along but they've had to cut way back, one said 'It was like I was building a house with a nailgun, but it got taken away and someone handed me a rock.' It took me two days without tweetbot to realize it was was one of the only things that kept me actually using twitter. Finally causing me to mothball my account and throw up a personal mastodon install and start re-finding my personal follows there (I'm at about 50% of my list, but i'm finding that mostly what I'm missing is retweets from a few degrees out). My feed's incoming posts per hour are certainly down from twitter by about 60% but I was honestly expecting much lower numbers.
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    Why isn’t there a Tweetbot for Mastodon? Onboarding is a PITA. With Twitter ceding the ground, this could be a real differentiator. Hell, you could build a licensing component paid to the servers.
    - sleepybrett 4y ago
      There is, it's just in beta. It's called Ivory: https://tapbots.com/ivory/ https://tapbots.com/ivory/ It won't help you, currently or maybe ever, pick a server, but it's a great client even in it's beta form.
morelisp 4y ago
> Advertisers dropped spending because they don't like Elon/his behavior. I mean, yeah? If someone fired all my contacts at a company and didn’t return my emails as my revenue dropped as a result of their changes I would also stop paying them?
- adam_arthur 4y ago
  Thanks for confirming
  - ReflectedImage 4y ago
    Twitter has lost 75% of it's employees, 50% of it's revenue and gained 25% more debt. It's gone from a break even company to financial ruination. Twitter is shutting down data centers and offices. Elon Musk has single handedly collapsed the company. Twitter will shortly be either bankrupt or personally funded by Elon Musk's bank balance by the end of the year.
    - adam_arthur 4y ago
      He overpaid massively for the company, yes. That was a critical mistake and why its now encumbered with debt.
      - sleepybrett 4y ago
        It seems like playing chicken with "Don't make me pay this hugely overinflated price I promised or I'll crash the company." as your strategy maybe wasn't such a smart idea. Now he's out the money and has literally nothing to show for it. Meanwhile his other ego stock, which he somehow had manipulated into a wild overvaluation, is now crashing because everyone can plainly see that he's just kinda a dumb motherfucker.
- ghaff 4y ago
  And Twitter needs advertisers more than advertisers need Twitter. Maybe there are exceptions but I can't imagine Twitter is this uniquely wonderful channel for the vast bulk of advertisers.

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.
  - luckylion 4y ago
    Twitter didn't have a keyword list to exclude after being in the business for like 20 years? They needed ad buyers to manually contact them and then needed someone to add that with a developer?
    - dragontamer 4y ago
      IIRC, those tools were in an incomplete state before the takeover... but at least they were somewhat working and Twitter's executives were prompt in responding to any issues. But the APIs have been degenerating rapidly after the takeover. When the tools aren't working as expected, the advertisers then emailed Twitter's API teams. All of those teams have been dismantled, the executives have been fired. With no one left to contact, the advertisers have begun to leave.
      - luckylion 4y ago
        That's wild. Why is ad buying such a mess? Google's setup felt extremely outdated last I had to work with it. Is it just largely ignored because it's assumed that most buyers will work with some agency / platform that will integrate with the API and provide a better UI?
  - TigeriusKirk 4y ago
    Southwest and Disney continue to advertise on Twitter, so I assume they're satisfied with the tools in place.

JumpCrisscross 4y ago

> Twitter has functioned fine after massive layoffs, and feature velocity has only accelerated Feature velocity for users. Not customers. Also, the deprecation of APIs strongly intimates Twitter Blue was a failure.

sleepybrett 4y ago
> Also, the deprecation of APIs ... and has driven away, or may drive away, many of the core content providers for their network effects. People who buy a third party client for twitter are generally not casual users. I reached out to a few friends I would consider 'posters' a couple of journos, a couple of 'personal brand' advertiser types... all of their twitter engagement is way down .. from both sides of the conversation. Two of them are now in a 'mostly I just post now' mode. Having conversations has become to hard. The other two are struggling along but they've had to cut way back, one said 'It was like I was building a house with a nailgun, but it got taken away and someone handed me a rock.' It took me two days without tweetbot to realize it was was one of the only things that kept me actually using twitter. Finally causing me to mothball my account and throw up a personal mastodon install and start re-finding my personal follows there (I'm at about 50% of my list, but i'm finding that mostly what I'm missing is retweets from a few degrees out). My feed's incoming posts per hour are certainly down from twitter by about 60% but I was honestly expecting much lower numbers.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  Why isn’t there a Tweetbot for Mastodon? Onboarding is a PITA. With Twitter ceding the ground, this could be a real differentiator. Hell, you could build a licensing component paid to the servers.
  - sleepybrett 4y ago
    There is, it's just in beta. It's called Ivory: https://tapbots.com/ivory/ https://tapbots.com/ivory/ It won't help you, currently or maybe ever, pick a server, but it's a great client even in it's beta form.

morelisp 4y ago

> Advertisers dropped spending because they don't like Elon/his behavior. I mean, yeah? If someone fired all my contacts at a company and didn’t return my emails as my revenue dropped as a result of their changes I would also stop paying them?

adam_arthur 4y ago
Thanks for confirming
- ReflectedImage 4y ago
  Twitter has lost 75% of it's employees, 50% of it's revenue and gained 25% more debt. It's gone from a break even company to financial ruination. Twitter is shutting down data centers and offices. Elon Musk has single handedly collapsed the company. Twitter will shortly be either bankrupt or personally funded by Elon Musk's bank balance by the end of the year.
  - adam_arthur 4y ago
    He overpaid massively for the company, yes. That was a critical mistake and why its now encumbered with debt.
    - sleepybrett 4y ago
      It seems like playing chicken with "Don't make me pay this hugely overinflated price I promised or I'll crash the company." as your strategy maybe wasn't such a smart idea. Now he's out the money and has literally nothing to show for it. Meanwhile his other ego stock, which he somehow had manipulated into a wild overvaluation, is now crashing because everyone can plainly see that he's just kinda a dumb motherfucker.
ghaff 4y ago
And Twitter needs advertisers more than advertisers need Twitter. Maybe there are exceptions but I can't imagine Twitter is this uniquely wonderful channel for the vast bulk of advertisers.