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Twitter's top advertisers have left
- fortran77 4y agoSee also https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/11/technology/bad-digital-ads.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/11/technology/bad-digital-ad...
- ttyprintk 4y agoI think that’s the real evolving story here. It’s no mystery why advertisers don’t want their ads next to posts by a human trafficker. Twitter still has good value for political ads, though, and I believe will run some high-profile sales.
- lapcat 4y agoRelated: Extremist influencers are generating millions for Twitter https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34738473 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34738473 View counts on Twitter aren’t accurate https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34748435 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34748435 Most Experts Agree That Elon Has Made Twitter’s Child Sexual Abuse Problem Worse https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34750659 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34750659
- zpeti 4y ago[flagged]
- Wherecombinator 4y agoMost experts believed the vaccine wouldn’t stop transmission, but lessen the effects of its symptoms.
- pseudo0 4y ago> “So even though there are breakthrough infections with vaccinated people, almost always the people are asymptomatic and the level of virus is so low it makes it extremely unlikely — not impossible but very, very low likelihood — that they’re going to transmit it,” Fauci said. https://thehill.com/homenews/sunday-talk-shows/553773-fauci-vaccinated-people-become-dead-ends-for-the-coronavirus/ https://thehill.com/homenews/sunday-talk-shows/553773-fauci-...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- mynameishere 4y ago[flagged]
- franze 4y ago> HBO, for example, was Twitter’s top advertiser in September, spending nearly $12 million on ads that month, but for the month of January (as of January 25), it spent just over $54,000. I wonder how that business case for HBO looked like that it was worth 12M per month? And if was, then cutting it back to 54k does not make sense. Seems to me like a case of "We need those ads"-spend that rose over time, and nobody cared to look into to evaluate it again.
- jnovek 4y agoRegardless of whether the ad spend was bearing fruit, Zaslav’s Warner-Discovery is big on austerity. For HBO in particular, that could be a (potentially bigger) factor over Twitter becoming an unpalatable platform… although I’m sure recent changes to Twitter don’t help.
- eddyfromtheblok 4y agoI see HBO ads for their two most buzzed about series on Snap daily
- kenjackson 4y agoThere’s the old saying with advertising. Maybe HBO decided to spend that $12m on the other half.
- remram 4y agoThose are the figures for Twitter, so maybe HBO just reallocated those $12M on Facebook/Google/billboards instead.
- woodruffw 4y agoIt’s not the first or last time someone will say this, but I continue to be fascinated by the sheer scale of Twitter’s self-ablation: I’m not aware of any other company or company leadership that has worked so directly to erode its market position and latent value in so little time. Generations of insufferable MBAs will no doubt study Twitter’s acquisition looking for the method in the madness.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- AndrewKemendo 4y agoMy totally wild idea here is that he's trying to glitch the banking system by incurring the largest possible personal loss (though it's all levered) in history so that he never has to pay taxes for any of his space adventures in the future To be clear I don't fall into the "5D Chess Genius Elon Musk" trope However he's smart and a sociopath who has shown expertise in financial engineering using any sources he can with no regard to the fallout so long as it pushes the "Musk as space leader" narrative
- yellow_lead 4y agoLosing $X money in order to not pay taxes on up to $X income, where you could've just not lost $X in the first place, isn't exactly financial engineering.
- lapcat 4y agoMusk doesn't have to pay taxes on his stock unless and until he sells it, which ironically is what he has been forced to do in order to finance the Twitter deal. So if he wanted to avoid paying taxes, purchasing Twitter was the dumbest idea ever. But I seriously doubt that was his reason. Money aside, Musk seems to genuinely enjoy using Twitter, and all the attention he gets from it, so it would be personally self-destructive for him to destroy the company in some kind of convoluted tax avoidance scheme. If he wanted to lose money, he could do it with a company he doesn't care about.
- classified 4y ago
- ajsnigrutin 4y agoIs it just twitter or in other places too? Here in slovenia, the "real world" ad space (public ad displays, posters, jumbo posters,...), which was once full of ads for random commercial stuff (supermarkets, cars, fashion brands...) is now getting filled with ads for blood donations (nationalized healthcare, so not a private clinic), theatre and drama stuff (again, state financed) and even some leftover anti-firecracker 'ads' still left on since the time before the new year. There are still a lot of purely commercial ads, but the ratio is visibly shifting, as if companies are running out of marketing budgets, or don't want to advertise during the "depressive" months (people spent money for presents in december and are not spending so much now). Could be anecdotal and just something happening locally though.
- netrus 4y agoI was subscribed to TIME magazine around 2008, and it was astonishing to see whole issues with hardly any ads. I think it is as you said: When money is tight, it is comparatively easy to cut marketing spending for some time (easier than lay-offs, for example) and in addition to that, marketing might be less effective when people try to figure out how to cut their spending.
- kristianc 4y agoMost marketing experts agree that cutting spend during a downturn is one of the worst things you can do — typically space is going much cheaper than in the boom times, so it gives brands a chance to acquire mindshare / brand recall cheaply. On the other hand, for brands that do cut spend, the drop off is swift, and costs a lot to recover when the economy picks up again. Still, cutting in a downturn is not at all uncommon.
- throwawaysleep 4y agoWho looks out a year ahead? Most people currently making the decisions in a role won’t be there in a year or two.
- juve1996 4y ago
- threatofrain 4y agohttps://twitter.com/LouPas/status/1588599808587345921 https://twitter.com/LouPas/status/1588599808587345921
- Lanz 4y ago[flagged]
- tpmx 4y agoPlease remind me: Why have these companies stopped buying ads on Twitter?
- Rebelgecko 4y agoProbably brand safety
- tpmx 4y agoSure, but why, specifically?
- Rebelgecko 4y agoI would not be surprised if they have metrics showing brand safety going down as content moderators got laid off. Disney doesn't want to visit the top page of reddit and see a screenshot of their Twitter ads running next to a video of Kanye and Alex Jones
- honeybadger1 4y ago[flagged]
- nickthegreek 4y agoWhich show and episodes? My niece has been looking for some quality educational programming.
- honeybadger1 4y agoAre you also keeping her from playing Hogwarts Legacy?
- badwolf 4y agois the CRT in the room with us right now?
- naillo 4y agoSounds like a great opportunity to buy high value ads then at a huge discount.
- woodruffw 4y agoAssuming, of course, that the pricing model for ads is correct[1]! This can be read either as an opportune purchasing moment, as "chickens coming to roost" for Twitter's own mismanagement, a broad advertising market correction, or all three. [1]: https://www.fsgoriginals.com/books/subprime-attention-crisis https://www.fsgoriginals.com/books/subprime-attention-crisis
- akmarinov 4y agoThe thing is that you’d be selling to a certain crowd that’s now left at Twitter, that’s not entirely desirable ad-wise.
- honeybadger1 4y ago[flagged]
- lithos 4y agoWere Twitter's ads ever that valuable? I always figured that social media advertising was closer to trying to advertise to people who already put all their time into that social media(kinda close to an addict), meaning there's only a small subset of services that are actually sell-able to such a person.
- NelsonMinar 4y agoThe problem is the ads aren't high value anymore.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- mabbo 4y agoAdvertisers haven't left for political reasons. They've left because the value of ads on Twitter aren't worth the cost they're being asked to pay. The only thing you can trust large publicly traded companies to do is the thing they believe will make them the most money.
- orange_joe 4y agoHere’s the thing — even if the advertisers leaving twitter isn’t Elon’s fault (I think it is). The threat to the company that it poses is. He chose to buy it with leverage in an inflationary economy, and he now has to deal of the billion to two billion in interest that the company has to pay annually. The company simply doesn’t have the cushion to survive a single downturn unless Elon decides to drain his wealth to keep this project alive.
- jeegsy 4y agoI always find articles like these odd. CNN states a "fact"(1), then states a bunch of other "facts" with the obvious implication that this is the reason for 1. Yet in no where in the article did the affected parties go on record to corroborate this. Nevertheless they have successfully gotten the message out there that Twitter is in trouble under Elon.
- ttyprintk 4y agoThe better sources in this comment gave useful details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34752652 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34752652
- MattDemers 4y ago>Yet in no where in the article did the affected parties go on record to corroborate this. Not excusing the article, but it feels very rare that we get someone "on the record" or an objective "this is actually happening due to the information we have" out of journalism. It's opinion and supposition disguised as fact. Obviously it's because of NDAs, punishments for going on-record and personal safety, but it still feels like that shouldn't be an excuse for shoddy articles.
- orev 4y agoThat’s quite a huge leap from “here’s a bunch of facts the seem to point to a specific conclusion” to “it’s all shoddy journalism and nothing but opinions”. This article lays out a number of facts, which quite clearly connects the dots to a clear picture of what’s going on. Even in science we mostly have a “bunch of facts that probably point to a specific conclusion” and that’s usually the best we can get.
- jeegsy 4y ago> quite clearly connects the dots to a clear picture Thats the opinion part
- nostromo123 4y agoWell this has been basically CNN's whole "journalism" model for years. I'm old enough to remember how "Trump has small hands and I don't like him anyway" was basically given as the reason for all evils under the sun.
- gardenhedge 4y agoIf Musk can get Twitter running without being subjected to advertisers goals and wishes then it would be a massive win imo
- remram 4y agoIf users have to pay per tweet and the platform is down every few days I'm not sure who'd be winning.
- graeme 4y ago….all the revenue was ads and Musk has not found a replacement. Twitter Blue was minuscule. They’re not even really trying to replace ads. For example, they just shut down all third party twitter apps. They could have instead said “to use a third party app you need twitter blue” But they nuked the space instead, principally because their api has no way to display ads in these apps.
- joenathanone 4y agoBy not paying rent and putting beds in the office? No reason to defend this clear insanity.
- mypastself 4y agoDid other similar companies experience equivalent decline during this period? Did those top advertisers reduce their spending elsewhere as well? How many of them have publicly stated their reasons? How much of the total ad revenue comes from the top 1000 advertisers? Once we get answers to those questions, we can start making conclusions about the causes and the impact beyond simple speculation.
- amriksohata 4y agoIt doesn't matter, musk has a much more reliable and lucrative business plan, $8 for a blue tick, less need for ads.
- nickthegreek 4y ago…the numbers are out on Twitter blue sub revenue. It’s missing at least one zero to be replacing the monthly ad money. Probably 2.
- valeg 4y agoIt's time for MLM schemes and woo supplements to fully move in. Also, Anya Taylor-Joy verified account has pushed laptops recently. I doubt that she is really in need of that. Also, Elon can make a mint on political advertising in the coming cycle.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- stefanwlb 4y ago[dead]