17 ms·

LinkedIn ad prices up as X plummets

65 points by KnuthIsGod 3y ago

buzzwords 3y ago
Putting all of the Elon BS aside. Can someone in marketing shine some light on how does X compare to other platforms?
- Veuxdo 3y ago
  The thing is you can't put it aside. People are leaving in droves, as are advertisers. At this point brands don't want to even be on X, much less advertise there. That compares _badly_ to other platforms, needless to say.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    >People are leaving in droves I sure wish they were. I think that's exactly why for this brief moment the GP wants to focus more on he business realities than the same drama that's happened for the past 6 months.
    - mrguyorama 3y ago
      Anyone still left on Twitter at this point has clearly signaled that the terminally online nature of it is more important than anything else. IE, they are signalling that getting the most banal comments from important people the very second they make them is more important to them than getting quality content, or not supporting an actively hostile system, or doing actual journalism. I really really don't need up to the second information about whatever Corey Doctorow is saying, as I read his books almost twenty years ago and they still seem to accurately portray his thoughts on many things, also he has a blog. Doomscrolling a tiny cachet of "important to me" people, isn't actually important or useful. You lived just fine before Twitter, surely you will do okay getting your news 24 hours behind some person who hasn't left twitter but somehow is able to sort through all the dross to pull out what little signal is still there.
      - johnnyanmac 3y ago
        Sure, I agree. And I also think that the lion's share of people prefer convenience over quality 99.99% of the time. I don't know if that's a mentality that can be changed, and Twitter captured most of that market. You can only become the next twitter and be subject to the same flaws or try to seek out the relative minority that is seeking quality over noise.
  - UncleOxidant 3y ago
    > People are leaving in droves I was chatting with someone recently who is still on Xitter and he was wondering why so many of his followers had recently been "suspended". I got to wondering: if a lot of people are leaving and X doesn't want that to be something the remaining people focus on are they just calling people who have deleted their accounts "suspended"?
  - OrvalWintermute 3y ago
    Many censored people are coming back to Twitter/X Twitter/X seems to have good engagement and there are active Geopolitics, Israeli/Zionist, Palestinian/Muslim, Russian, Ukrainian (NAFO), Covid, anti-MSM, anti-Disinfo, populist, Crypto/NFT, Black American, sports, and many Indian and African spaces on an ongoing regular basis, several running concurrently at many times of the day. I like that I can go into multiple spaces at different times and hear radically different perspectives unfiltered. This is why the platform appears to be getting much more sticky. The Spaces bug where you can't hear people is the most annoying thing about it, other than the link interception. I'm bothered by the 3 levels of subscription - the basic, premium and premium+. The premium still has ads everywhere, and the + does not, but costs more. I think both should be ad-free. I hate ads particularly when I am already paying for the service! https://help.twitter.com/en/using-x/x-premium#tbpricing-bycountry https://help.twitter.com/en/using-x/x-premium#tbpricing-byco... Given that Premium users are supposed to see 50% less ads, I cannot imagine what kind of ad hellscape it would be if I was not at premium level. I block every ad X account I see. It is a good place for breaking news and unfiltered data. There is still weaponization of the CommunityNotes, and active shilling and astroturfing by intelligence agencies doing propaganda online. I have not used Grok at all so I cannot comment there
    - threeseed 3y ago
      > Twitter/X seems to have good engagement Perhaps. But not for the audiences that matter to advertisers.
      - OrvalWintermute 3y ago
        Many of the people that I engage with on Twitter have been censored on other platforms, folks that are described as the Classical Left, Libertarian Left, Libertarian Right, Populists, the Antiwar types, and now it includes both Palestinian and Zionist perspectives, I'd like to hear these viewpoints without going through gatekeeper MSM Since I am a paying customer and I block all ads, I am not sure how much the ad stuff matters. I hate ads!
  - parineum 3y ago
    > People are leaving in droves I am not and have never been on Twitter so I can't speak for what's happening on the platform but the places I frequent that post news that's broken on Twitter haven't stopped doing that so, at the very least, influential people are still breaking news there at the same place. I can't help but think that the people leaving Twitter meme is wishful thinking by people who dislike Musk.
    - Veuxdo 3y ago
      The valuation really tells the story, I think. There's no way to square "Twitter's valuation drops 75%" and "everyone is still on Twitter and just as engaged as ever". These cannot possibly both be true at once.
      - johnnyanmac 3y ago
        Sure they can. You assume the valuation is directly proportional to the traffic of twitter. It's likely more about the ad customers on twitter, and they very much are leaving in droves from what I'm hearing. That doesn't mean the users aren't still there. I'll ask the corollary question to rein this in: where are people going if they aren't on twitter anymore? Tiktok? Instagram? It sure isn't Bluesky at the moment.
        Veuxdo 3y ago
        "Follow the money". And the money follows the users.
        johnnyanmac 3y ago
        Normally, yes. But the only thing brands love more than money is good brand assossiation. And that's where Musk comes in. Users can ignore that. Brands can't.
  - gsa 3y ago
    > People are leaving in droves I stopped posting to Twitter some time last year but most of the people I follow on Twitter/X are still active and haven't moved. It is still the biggest platform compared to any of the alternatives (Mastodon/Bluesky) and despite the downward spiral it will be with us for a long time (just like Facebook).
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- Forgeties79 3y ago
  IIRC Twitter charges a fair bit more per impression than IG/FB/etc. (like $3 vs $.50?) but they also average higher engagement/click-through's than their contemporaries, like 10-15x (again if memory serves). It's been a while since I looked at these stats though. What I don't recall is the amount of ads flowing on each site. I do believe facebook generally has more ads happening than the rest.
- threeseed 3y ago
  My partner's ecommerce business spends millions a year on marketing and is typical of the type of SME that represents the bulk of total advertising spend. Twitter/X has always been a far distant third to Meta and Google. It's targeting performance is poor, return on ad spend poor and the capabilities of the ad platform poor. Maybe for some niches e.g. AI startup it was useful but for most SME it was useless and their percentage of overall ad spend reflects this. For large brands what it was good for was brand awareness. Nothing makes you appear relevant than being alongside the latest trends or news which Twitter excelled it. Which is why when their ads appeared alongside hate speech they were so quick to move. Because they didn't have any real money being generated with them anyway.
- rsynnott 3y ago
  This feels a bit like saying “apart from the fact that the apartment building is on fire, why are so many people leaving it?”
  - s1artibartfast 3y ago
    If a building is on fire, there are still other facts about it that can be known or learned.
- etchalon 3y ago
  Twitter/X hasn't traditionally been cheaper than other brand-awareness ad spends, and has performed worse. The best argument for Twitter/X was always that the audience size mattered less than the audience influence. This is why the abandonment of Twitter/X by large audience segments has been such a compounding effect. Even if they can replace 1:1 people they're losing with new users, if the users aren't the right type of demographic, ad spend is going to collapse.
- tmpz22 3y ago
  You can't put the Elon BS aside because it continually impacts the efficacy of ads on the X/Twitter. A larger percentage of the ads are scams surrounding trends like NFTs because of his dictated moderation and staffing changes. Views are amplified for himself and his preferred posters - which for all you know may land your company's logo next to Alex Jones. > Putting all of the Elon BS aside. Can someone in marketing shine some light on how does X compare to other platforms? Brand/PR/Reputation is a liability and most big enterprises will continue to optimize for diminishing liabilities by moving to more reliable platforms.
  - s1artibartfast 3y ago
    I think you miss the point of putting something aside. It doesn't mean you have to ignore it or say it doesn't exist. You can ask what else can be said about X besides the given topic that you are putting aside.
    - __loam 3y ago
      And he's saying there's almost no point in asking that question because Elon's way of running the company has been so impactlful to the platform that considering it without him is pointless.
      - s1artibartfast 3y ago
        That is just refusing to engage with the question on its own merits, and preferring to talk about Musk. It is simple to think of interesting questions and topics besides Musk. It is fine if someone doesn't want to answer it, but a respondant doesn't get to call it pointless, because objective and goal lies with the asker.
        __loam 3y ago
        Yes. Musk fired the majority of people working at Twitter, changed the brand, unbanned very controversial users, alienated most of the advertisers, etc etc etc. Talking about Twitter without talking about his leadership is to have a conversation without merit. What other topics are there? He owns the company. Every policy change over the past year has been his personal decision.
- Closi 3y ago
  It will depend on what you are looking to get out of advertising - immediate sales or engagement/awareness. If you are an eCommerce business selling a widget then you can easily get a cost per conversion, and then it's pretty easy to optimise your spend to maximise profits (i.e. If I spend $30 on ads, I can sell a product I buy for $40 for $90 making $20). I've seen businesses with this revenue model who will spend the equivalent of c.30-40% of revenue to get the sales due to the high margins often involved. Your conversion will depend a lot on your product, target market, the ad etc (if you are selling a business rolodex your CPC might be better on linkedin, if you are selling a selfie-stick your CPC might be better on insta etc). The effectiveness of advertising for engagement/brand awareness is much softer, and the spend will be much more discretionary as it is harder to track. It's these ads which are more likely to fall away IMO.
throwaway914 3y ago
Trading 1 trash platform for another. LinkedIn could be such a great place if it didn't abuse your information and subscribe to such dark patterns. I still remember having my entire address book harvested and spammed (way back when). I will never forget that. I will never trust LinkedIn. Doesn't matter what they do.
- mjhay 3y ago
  What are you gonna do, not use LinkedIn?
  - throwaway914 3y ago
    I'm not saying it's practical for everyone, but while the default is LinkedIn I have found great opportunities without it.
  - neaden 3y ago
    I use LinkedIn as in have an account, but I basically never log in except once every few months to accept invitations and maybe to update something on my profile. So from an ad selling perspective I might as well not have one.
    - iteria 3y ago
      I didn't even know LinkedIn had ads. I assume they made all their money from charging companies to post job postings (which are ads I guess) and recruiters to be able to reach out
      - rad_gruchalski 3y ago
        Any promoted post is essentially an ad. My feed is full of it. I just ignore and use the notifications tab most of the time.
  - eyelidlessness 3y ago
    I’ve never used it. Never even created an account… though I was on the receiving end of said address book harvesting, so they just created an account “for” me and spam me as if I’m a user nonetheless.
m_a_g 3y ago
LinkedIn is aging like fine wine in Microsoft’s cellar. Microsoft surprises me with OpenAI, LinkedIn and GitHub. Their own engineering practices aren’t that great but they seem to excel at what to acquire and what to invest in.
- p_j_w 3y ago
  > LinkedIn is aging like fine wine Is there a non-shitty version of LinkedIn somewhere that I don’t know about? The one I use seems to have turned into a version of Facebook with rants trying to get me to buy into glorifying the grind instead of photos of kids and political rants.
  - graphe 3y ago
    Good for Microsoft doesn't mean good for you.
    - digging 3y ago
      Poor turn of phrase then? Certainly wouldn't call the bloated, parasite-riddle LinkedIn "like fine wine".
      - hot_gril 3y ago
        It's keeping the users and making money, that's what matters.
      - klyrs 3y ago
        In this economy, the users are the product. If LinkedIn is fine wine, we're the grapes.
      - johnnyanmac 3y ago
        You're thinking in the lens of a consumer, that's the issue. I'm sure to Nadella MSFT is making off like a bandit. The users looking for a job aren't the customers of LinkedIn.
    - 3y ago
smith7018 3y ago
One wouldn't think that Twitter and LinkedIn's ad markets are 1:1 but I guess advertisers have to put their budget somewhere for the time being. It would be interesting to see how ad campaigns that targeted Twitter's more general user base fare on the more professionally-minded LinkedIn. I'm far more likely to be interested in an AppleTV ad on Twitter than if I saw it on LinkedIn but that might just be me.
- rsynnott 3y ago
  I mean, they’re definitely not; I assume Coca-cola isn’t running big brand-building campaigns on LinkedIn, even now, say. But there’d certainly be _some_ crossover.
ramesh31 3y ago
Given that Twitter now consists of Elon and whatever ragtag bunch of H1Bs are keeping the lights on, how can they possibly even go to the trade desk with a straight face? They literally have zero meaningful metrics at this point, and the brand value is trending into the negative.
- meibo 3y ago
  Don't worry, it's going great! 99,99% of Tweet impressions are healthy! No single user saw these Nazis next to your ads! These metrics are as trustworthy as our leadership!
- lostlogin 3y ago
  > the brand value is trending into the negative. The brand value of X is, but in a master stroke they can rebrand as Twitter.
  - throitallaway 3y ago
    Coca-Cola -> New Coke -> Coca-Cola Classic. Brilliant!
hinkley 3y ago
When I was in high school and college, I had bad insomnia. I watched a lot of late night TV as a consequence. I understood demographics and targeted advertising, and I found it insulting how asinine late night TV ads were. This is who they think I am? Took me a while to realize that very few of those ads were really targeted, it’s just when the cheap ad slots were. If you spend a lot on ads it’s valuable to spend a bit more to make sure they’re connecting. But if you’re going cheap the shotgun effect isn’t a terrible strategy. I think X is quickly going to find that Billy Mays was a paragon of cheap ad placements and half of what they get will be worse.
- bdcravens 3y ago
  It's already happening. Lately, my X feed has been showing a lot of ads for cheap Aliexpress drop-shipped products that are way overpriced. (selling for $24 what you can find on Amazon for $8) Maybe that's just because of the Christmas selling season, or maybe that's a hint of the new normal.
  - mrguyorama 3y ago
    It's the norm in most entry level content pipelines. Instagram for example has been autogenerated computer voiced spam audio over stock footage for a literally physically impossible product for years. You basically cannot buy a legitimate product from an instagram ad. For a decade or more, a reliable grift has been selling "buy something on ali-express and sell it on another site for 10x markup" as some sort of business secret to low information people and other scam-vulnerable populations, and nearly all of them nowadays amount to "the next step is to buy $10k worth of ads on instagram" for the same white label product that everyone else is dropshipping. They're just get-rich-quick schemes. That's why they are so clearly low effort and fraudulent, because that's just how get-rich-quick schemes always are, because the target audience believes that if they just scam a little harder, they can be rich too.
- jdjdjdkdksmdnd 3y ago
  i love these comments. i never have a problem with comments where people are drawing on something they experienced. i treasure those comments. its funny because every other comment makes me feel like shit. like the world has gone to shit. and i make a lot of them. its funny that you would think that those ads were targeted to you. television was so insanely monolithic. it was a shared experience. everyone thought the same thing. the idea of targeting anyone in particular with television seems silly today…
ghusto 3y ago
I'd believe this more if it wasn't alleged that they were going to _LinkedIn_. Who the heck uses LinkedIn? And of those that do, how many of them are the target audience for Disney?
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  People who want a job or need to maintain a professional network. Who uses Twitter?
  - ghusto 3y ago
    Do people actually benefit from this "professional network"? I mean has anyone actually found work like this? I just mentioned I'm free to real people I know.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - temp_praneshp 3y ago
      None of my actual jobs were through linkedin, but that's just luck. I've done several onsites as a result of either applying through linkedin, or because someone messaged me.
    - redhale 3y ago
      People on LinkedIn are real. If you use it like a communication tool, it can be very effective at locating opportunities or helping others do the same. I have thousands of loose connections on LinkedIn, many of whom I would/could never email/text/call directly looking for work. But with a single LinkedIn post, I am likely to get many responses / offers of help. I wouldn't bank on this being my only avenue to finding work, but it definitely is AN avenue if you use it right. In parallel, many LinkedIn "influencers" are spamming garbage. You just need to ignore it, similar to how you might ignore garbage accounts on Twitter.
    - johnnyanmac 3y ago
      Yes? First job I just found on a company website. Second as well, but I did talk to the recruiter and connect with them through LinkedIn in the process. Third job was entirely through LinkedIn. found the job post there, found an old contact from college through there who gave me a referral, introduced to the recruiter through LinkedIn. 4th job is still up in the air, but I was approached for freelance work via LinkedIn in the meantime. ---- You definitely don't need to play the networing game to get a job, especially not if you're in tech. But having a publicly viewable resume sitting there and an old contact book of information (which is less intimate than asking for a number or email) was valuable enough for the $0 I directly paid for it. I do get 80% spam and recruiters who clearly never read my profile, but thats unfortunately most of society these days, be it internet, phone, or snail mail.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
geodel 3y ago
I mean is it even surprising. LinkedIn: Mostly thought leaders, few thought followers. X: Few thought leaders, mostly followers. If I have some ad budget, I'd rather spend it on reaching out to leaders.
- OrvalWintermute 3y ago
  > LinkedIn: Mostly thought leaders, few thought followers. I find LinkedIn to be full of people that think they are thought leaders, but really are not. Useless articles mainly that do not drive engagement. I prefer here on HN and Twitter for what I consider thought leaders.
  - geodel 3y ago
    Of course! that's why I put it in italics .
technion 3y ago
Ironic given half my LinkedIn feed has been overtaken by this ridiculous meta of screen capping your own tweets, photoshopping a blue tick into it and posting on LinkedIn. Edit: A relevant example. https://infosec.exchange/@malwaretech/111053576407435909 https://infosec.exchange/@malwaretech/111053576407435909
- midasuni 3y ago
  Surely you’d install or write an extension which auto adds a blue tick to your own post for a screenshot if you’re that bothered.
londons_explore 3y ago
Twitter ads were mostly for brand awareness - the ads don't directly lead to sales, but they lead to a good brand image which leads to indirect sales later. The effectiveness of brand ads is notoriously hard to measure, so it comes down to the gut feeling of marketing execs rather than cold hard numbers like CPA like google ads. The gut feeling associated with twitter right now is, to put it mildly, rather low.
crowcroft 3y ago
Digital media budgets for almost all companies are essentially put into three buckets (larger companies might have a local publisher/programmatic/digital TV bucket as well). 1. Google Search 2. Meta/YouTube (maybe TikTok) 3. Other platforms/bets Bucket three is basically all of Reddit/Snap/X/Pinterest/LinkedIn etc., they are all sub scale, and they all perform worse than the other platforms in almost every single niche. None of them work particularly well, everyone knows they don't work super well, but we all keep throwing a few dollars their way because the idea of business performance being at the whim of two companies is frightening. They're all fighting over scraps though. I'm probably being a little hyperbolic, but probably not by much.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- MichaelZuo 3y ago
  There's option 4: offer the absolute best value for money in your niche and don't have a digital media budget, rely on word of mouth instead. e.g. Costco, Tesla itself in the early 2010s, etc...
  - amadeuspagel 3y ago
    Costco relies on membership, not word of mouth, and this is also how amazon got past google (amazon prime).
    - ttymck 3y ago
      How is membership a marketing channel?
      - jwestbury 3y ago
        Membership is a hook -- once you have a member, they're more likely to buy from you. It's not really a marketing channel, per se, but it is a method of increasing sales. "Marketing" gets kind of murky at the edges, really. Consider Pike Place Fish Market in Seattle, who are famous for their fish-throwing, but have never actually spent anything on advertising -- are they marketing or not?

65 points by KnuthIsGod 3y ago

buzzwords 3y ago

Putting all of the Elon BS aside. Can someone in marketing shine some light on how does X compare to other platforms?

Veuxdo 3y ago
The thing is you can't put it aside. People are leaving in droves, as are advertisers. At this point brands don't want to even be on X, much less advertise there. That compares _badly_ to other platforms, needless to say.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  >People are leaving in droves I sure wish they were. I think that's exactly why for this brief moment the GP wants to focus more on he business realities than the same drama that's happened for the past 6 months.
  - mrguyorama 3y ago
    Anyone still left on Twitter at this point has clearly signaled that the terminally online nature of it is more important than anything else. IE, they are signalling that getting the most banal comments from important people the very second they make them is more important to them than getting quality content, or not supporting an actively hostile system, or doing actual journalism. I really really don't need up to the second information about whatever Corey Doctorow is saying, as I read his books almost twenty years ago and they still seem to accurately portray his thoughts on many things, also he has a blog. Doomscrolling a tiny cachet of "important to me" people, isn't actually important or useful. You lived just fine before Twitter, surely you will do okay getting your news 24 hours behind some person who hasn't left twitter but somehow is able to sort through all the dross to pull out what little signal is still there.
    - johnnyanmac 3y ago
      Sure, I agree. And I also think that the lion's share of people prefer convenience over quality 99.99% of the time. I don't know if that's a mentality that can be changed, and Twitter captured most of that market. You can only become the next twitter and be subject to the same flaws or try to seek out the relative minority that is seeking quality over noise.
- UncleOxidant 3y ago
  > People are leaving in droves I was chatting with someone recently who is still on Xitter and he was wondering why so many of his followers had recently been "suspended". I got to wondering: if a lot of people are leaving and X doesn't want that to be something the remaining people focus on are they just calling people who have deleted their accounts "suspended"?
- OrvalWintermute 3y ago
  Many censored people are coming back to Twitter/X Twitter/X seems to have good engagement and there are active Geopolitics, Israeli/Zionist, Palestinian/Muslim, Russian, Ukrainian (NAFO), Covid, anti-MSM, anti-Disinfo, populist, Crypto/NFT, Black American, sports, and many Indian and African spaces on an ongoing regular basis, several running concurrently at many times of the day. I like that I can go into multiple spaces at different times and hear radically different perspectives unfiltered. This is why the platform appears to be getting much more sticky. The Spaces bug where you can't hear people is the most annoying thing about it, other than the link interception. I'm bothered by the 3 levels of subscription - the basic, premium and premium+. The premium still has ads everywhere, and the + does not, but costs more. I think both should be ad-free. I hate ads particularly when I am already paying for the service! https://help.twitter.com/en/using-x/x-premium#tbpricing-bycountry https://help.twitter.com/en/using-x/x-premium#tbpricing-byco... Given that Premium users are supposed to see 50% less ads, I cannot imagine what kind of ad hellscape it would be if I was not at premium level. I block every ad X account I see. It is a good place for breaking news and unfiltered data. There is still weaponization of the CommunityNotes, and active shilling and astroturfing by intelligence agencies doing propaganda online. I have not used Grok at all so I cannot comment there
  - threeseed 3y ago
    > Twitter/X seems to have good engagement Perhaps. But not for the audiences that matter to advertisers.
    - OrvalWintermute 3y ago
      Many of the people that I engage with on Twitter have been censored on other platforms, folks that are described as the Classical Left, Libertarian Left, Libertarian Right, Populists, the Antiwar types, and now it includes both Palestinian and Zionist perspectives, I'd like to hear these viewpoints without going through gatekeeper MSM Since I am a paying customer and I block all ads, I am not sure how much the ad stuff matters. I hate ads!
- parineum 3y ago
  > People are leaving in droves I am not and have never been on Twitter so I can't speak for what's happening on the platform but the places I frequent that post news that's broken on Twitter haven't stopped doing that so, at the very least, influential people are still breaking news there at the same place. I can't help but think that the people leaving Twitter meme is wishful thinking by people who dislike Musk.
  - Veuxdo 3y ago
    The valuation really tells the story, I think. There's no way to square "Twitter's valuation drops 75%" and "everyone is still on Twitter and just as engaged as ever". These cannot possibly both be true at once.
    - johnnyanmac 3y ago
      Sure they can. You assume the valuation is directly proportional to the traffic of twitter. It's likely more about the ad customers on twitter, and they very much are leaving in droves from what I'm hearing. That doesn't mean the users aren't still there. I'll ask the corollary question to rein this in: where are people going if they aren't on twitter anymore? Tiktok? Instagram? It sure isn't Bluesky at the moment.
      - Veuxdo 3y ago
        "Follow the money". And the money follows the users.
        johnnyanmac 3y ago
        Normally, yes. But the only thing brands love more than money is good brand assossiation. And that's where Musk comes in. Users can ignore that. Brands can't.
- gsa 3y ago
  > People are leaving in droves I stopped posting to Twitter some time last year but most of the people I follow on Twitter/X are still active and haven't moved. It is still the biggest platform compared to any of the alternatives (Mastodon/Bluesky) and despite the downward spiral it will be with us for a long time (just like Facebook).
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
Forgeties79 3y ago
IIRC Twitter charges a fair bit more per impression than IG/FB/etc. (like $3 vs $.50?) but they also average higher engagement/click-through's than their contemporaries, like 10-15x (again if memory serves). It's been a while since I looked at these stats though. What I don't recall is the amount of ads flowing on each site. I do believe facebook generally has more ads happening than the rest.
threeseed 3y ago
My partner's ecommerce business spends millions a year on marketing and is typical of the type of SME that represents the bulk of total advertising spend. Twitter/X has always been a far distant third to Meta and Google. It's targeting performance is poor, return on ad spend poor and the capabilities of the ad platform poor. Maybe for some niches e.g. AI startup it was useful but for most SME it was useless and their percentage of overall ad spend reflects this. For large brands what it was good for was brand awareness. Nothing makes you appear relevant than being alongside the latest trends or news which Twitter excelled it. Which is why when their ads appeared alongside hate speech they were so quick to move. Because they didn't have any real money being generated with them anyway.
rsynnott 3y ago
This feels a bit like saying “apart from the fact that the apartment building is on fire, why are so many people leaving it?”
- s1artibartfast 3y ago
  If a building is on fire, there are still other facts about it that can be known or learned.
etchalon 3y ago
Twitter/X hasn't traditionally been cheaper than other brand-awareness ad spends, and has performed worse. The best argument for Twitter/X was always that the audience size mattered less than the audience influence. This is why the abandonment of Twitter/X by large audience segments has been such a compounding effect. Even if they can replace 1:1 people they're losing with new users, if the users aren't the right type of demographic, ad spend is going to collapse.
tmpz22 3y ago
You can't put the Elon BS aside because it continually impacts the efficacy of ads on the X/Twitter. A larger percentage of the ads are scams surrounding trends like NFTs because of his dictated moderation and staffing changes. Views are amplified for himself and his preferred posters - which for all you know may land your company's logo next to Alex Jones. > Putting all of the Elon BS aside. Can someone in marketing shine some light on how does X compare to other platforms? Brand/PR/Reputation is a liability and most big enterprises will continue to optimize for diminishing liabilities by moving to more reliable platforms.
- s1artibartfast 3y ago
  I think you miss the point of putting something aside. It doesn't mean you have to ignore it or say it doesn't exist. You can ask what else can be said about X besides the given topic that you are putting aside.
  - __loam 3y ago
    And he's saying there's almost no point in asking that question because Elon's way of running the company has been so impactlful to the platform that considering it without him is pointless.
    - s1artibartfast 3y ago
      That is just refusing to engage with the question on its own merits, and preferring to talk about Musk. It is simple to think of interesting questions and topics besides Musk. It is fine if someone doesn't want to answer it, but a respondant doesn't get to call it pointless, because objective and goal lies with the asker.
      - __loam 3y ago
        Yes. Musk fired the majority of people working at Twitter, changed the brand, unbanned very controversial users, alienated most of the advertisers, etc etc etc. Talking about Twitter without talking about his leadership is to have a conversation without merit. What other topics are there? He owns the company. Every policy change over the past year has been his personal decision.
Closi 3y ago
It will depend on what you are looking to get out of advertising - immediate sales or engagement/awareness. If you are an eCommerce business selling a widget then you can easily get a cost per conversion, and then it's pretty easy to optimise your spend to maximise profits (i.e. If I spend $30 on ads, I can sell a product I buy for $40 for $90 making $20). I've seen businesses with this revenue model who will spend the equivalent of c.30-40% of revenue to get the sales due to the high margins often involved. Your conversion will depend a lot on your product, target market, the ad etc (if you are selling a business rolodex your CPC might be better on linkedin, if you are selling a selfie-stick your CPC might be better on insta etc). The effectiveness of advertising for engagement/brand awareness is much softer, and the spend will be much more discretionary as it is harder to track. It's these ads which are more likely to fall away IMO.

throwaway914 3y ago

Trading 1 trash platform for another. LinkedIn could be such a great place if it didn't abuse your information and subscribe to such dark patterns. I still remember having my entire address book harvested and spammed (way back when). I will never forget that. I will never trust LinkedIn. Doesn't matter what they do.

mjhay 3y ago
What are you gonna do, not use LinkedIn?
- throwaway914 3y ago
  I'm not saying it's practical for everyone, but while the default is LinkedIn I have found great opportunities without it.
- neaden 3y ago
  I use LinkedIn as in have an account, but I basically never log in except once every few months to accept invitations and maybe to update something on my profile. So from an ad selling perspective I might as well not have one.
  - iteria 3y ago
    I didn't even know LinkedIn had ads. I assume they made all their money from charging companies to post job postings (which are ads I guess) and recruiters to be able to reach out
    - rad_gruchalski 3y ago
      Any promoted post is essentially an ad. My feed is full of it. I just ignore and use the notifications tab most of the time.
- eyelidlessness 3y ago
  I’ve never used it. Never even created an account… though I was on the receiving end of said address book harvesting, so they just created an account “for” me and spam me as if I’m a user nonetheless.

m_a_g 3y ago

LinkedIn is aging like fine wine in Microsoft’s cellar. Microsoft surprises me with OpenAI, LinkedIn and GitHub. Their own engineering practices aren’t that great but they seem to excel at what to acquire and what to invest in.

p_j_w 3y ago
> LinkedIn is aging like fine wine Is there a non-shitty version of LinkedIn somewhere that I don’t know about? The one I use seems to have turned into a version of Facebook with rants trying to get me to buy into glorifying the grind instead of photos of kids and political rants.
- graphe 3y ago
  Good for Microsoft doesn't mean good for you.
  - digging 3y ago
    Poor turn of phrase then? Certainly wouldn't call the bloated, parasite-riddle LinkedIn "like fine wine".
    - hot_gril 3y ago
      It's keeping the users and making money, that's what matters.
    - klyrs 3y ago
      In this economy, the users are the product. If LinkedIn is fine wine, we're the grapes.
    - johnnyanmac 3y ago
      You're thinking in the lens of a consumer, that's the issue. I'm sure to Nadella MSFT is making off like a bandit. The users looking for a job aren't the customers of LinkedIn.
  - 3y ago

smith7018 3y ago

One wouldn't think that Twitter and LinkedIn's ad markets are 1:1 but I guess advertisers have to put their budget somewhere for the time being. It would be interesting to see how ad campaigns that targeted Twitter's more general user base fare on the more professionally-minded LinkedIn. I'm far more likely to be interested in an AppleTV ad on Twitter than if I saw it on LinkedIn but that might just be me.

rsynnott 3y ago
I mean, they’re definitely not; I assume Coca-cola isn’t running big brand-building campaigns on LinkedIn, even now, say. But there’d certainly be _some_ crossover.

ramesh31 3y ago

Given that Twitter now consists of Elon and whatever ragtag bunch of H1Bs are keeping the lights on, how can they possibly even go to the trade desk with a straight face? They literally have zero meaningful metrics at this point, and the brand value is trending into the negative.

meibo 3y ago
Don't worry, it's going great! 99,99% of Tweet impressions are healthy! No single user saw these Nazis next to your ads! These metrics are as trustworthy as our leadership!
lostlogin 3y ago
> the brand value is trending into the negative. The brand value of X is, but in a master stroke they can rebrand as Twitter.
- throitallaway 3y ago
  Coca-Cola -> New Coke -> Coca-Cola Classic. Brilliant!

hinkley 3y ago

When I was in high school and college, I had bad insomnia. I watched a lot of late night TV as a consequence. I understood demographics and targeted advertising, and I found it insulting how asinine late night TV ads were. This is who they think I am? Took me a while to realize that very few of those ads were really targeted, it’s just when the cheap ad slots were. If you spend a lot on ads it’s valuable to spend a bit more to make sure they’re connecting. But if you’re going cheap the shotgun effect isn’t a terrible strategy. I think X is quickly going to find that Billy Mays was a paragon of cheap ad placements and half of what they get will be worse.

bdcravens 3y ago
It's already happening. Lately, my X feed has been showing a lot of ads for cheap Aliexpress drop-shipped products that are way overpriced. (selling for $24 what you can find on Amazon for $8) Maybe that's just because of the Christmas selling season, or maybe that's a hint of the new normal.
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  It's the norm in most entry level content pipelines. Instagram for example has been autogenerated computer voiced spam audio over stock footage for a literally physically impossible product for years. You basically cannot buy a legitimate product from an instagram ad. For a decade or more, a reliable grift has been selling "buy something on ali-express and sell it on another site for 10x markup" as some sort of business secret to low information people and other scam-vulnerable populations, and nearly all of them nowadays amount to "the next step is to buy $10k worth of ads on instagram" for the same white label product that everyone else is dropshipping. They're just get-rich-quick schemes. That's why they are so clearly low effort and fraudulent, because that's just how get-rich-quick schemes always are, because the target audience believes that if they just scam a little harder, they can be rich too.
jdjdjdkdksmdnd 3y ago
i love these comments. i never have a problem with comments where people are drawing on something they experienced. i treasure those comments. its funny because every other comment makes me feel like shit. like the world has gone to shit. and i make a lot of them. its funny that you would think that those ads were targeted to you. television was so insanely monolithic. it was a shared experience. everyone thought the same thing. the idea of targeting anyone in particular with television seems silly today…

ghusto 3y ago

I'd believe this more if it wasn't alleged that they were going to _LinkedIn_. Who the heck uses LinkedIn? And of those that do, how many of them are the target audience for Disney?

toomuchtodo 3y ago
People who want a job or need to maintain a professional network. Who uses Twitter?
- ghusto 3y ago
  Do people actually benefit from this "professional network"? I mean has anyone actually found work like this? I just mentioned I'm free to real people I know.
  - deleted 3y ago
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  - temp_praneshp 3y ago
    None of my actual jobs were through linkedin, but that's just luck. I've done several onsites as a result of either applying through linkedin, or because someone messaged me.
  - redhale 3y ago
    People on LinkedIn are real. If you use it like a communication tool, it can be very effective at locating opportunities or helping others do the same. I have thousands of loose connections on LinkedIn, many of whom I would/could never email/text/call directly looking for work. But with a single LinkedIn post, I am likely to get many responses / offers of help. I wouldn't bank on this being my only avenue to finding work, but it definitely is AN avenue if you use it right. In parallel, many LinkedIn "influencers" are spamming garbage. You just need to ignore it, similar to how you might ignore garbage accounts on Twitter.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    Yes? First job I just found on a company website. Second as well, but I did talk to the recruiter and connect with them through LinkedIn in the process. Third job was entirely through LinkedIn. found the job post there, found an old contact from college through there who gave me a referral, introduced to the recruiter through LinkedIn. 4th job is still up in the air, but I was approached for freelance work via LinkedIn in the meantime. ---- You definitely don't need to play the networing game to get a job, especially not if you're in tech. But having a publicly viewable resume sitting there and an old contact book of information (which is less intimate than asking for a number or email) was valuable enough for the $0 I directly paid for it. I do get 80% spam and recruiters who clearly never read my profile, but thats unfortunately most of society these days, be it internet, phone, or snail mail.

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geodel 3y ago

I mean is it even surprising. LinkedIn: Mostly thought leaders, few thought followers. X: Few thought leaders, mostly followers. If I have some ad budget, I'd rather spend it on reaching out to leaders.

OrvalWintermute 3y ago
> LinkedIn: Mostly thought leaders, few thought followers. I find LinkedIn to be full of people that think they are thought leaders, but really are not. Useless articles mainly that do not drive engagement. I prefer here on HN and Twitter for what I consider thought leaders.
- geodel 3y ago
  Of course! that's why I put it in italics .

technion 3y ago

Ironic given half my LinkedIn feed has been overtaken by this ridiculous meta of screen capping your own tweets, photoshopping a blue tick into it and posting on LinkedIn. Edit: A relevant example. https://infosec.exchange/@malwaretech/111053576407435909 https://infosec.exchange/@malwaretech/111053576407435909

midasuni 3y ago
Surely you’d install or write an extension which auto adds a blue tick to your own post for a screenshot if you’re that bothered.

londons_explore 3y ago

Twitter ads were mostly for brand awareness - the ads don't directly lead to sales, but they lead to a good brand image which leads to indirect sales later. The effectiveness of brand ads is notoriously hard to measure, so it comes down to the gut feeling of marketing execs rather than cold hard numbers like CPA like google ads. The gut feeling associated with twitter right now is, to put it mildly, rather low.

crowcroft 3y ago

Digital media budgets for almost all companies are essentially put into three buckets (larger companies might have a local publisher/programmatic/digital TV bucket as well). 1. Google Search 2. Meta/YouTube (maybe TikTok) 3. Other platforms/bets Bucket three is basically all of Reddit/Snap/X/Pinterest/LinkedIn etc., they are all sub scale, and they all perform worse than the other platforms in almost every single niche. None of them work particularly well, everyone knows they don't work super well, but we all keep throwing a few dollars their way because the idea of business performance being at the whim of two companies is frightening. They're all fighting over scraps though. I'm probably being a little hyperbolic, but probably not by much.

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MichaelZuo 3y ago
There's option 4: offer the absolute best value for money in your niche and don't have a digital media budget, rely on word of mouth instead. e.g. Costco, Tesla itself in the early 2010s, etc...
- amadeuspagel 3y ago
  Costco relies on membership, not word of mouth, and this is also how amazon got past google (amazon prime).
  - ttymck 3y ago
    How is membership a marketing channel?
    - jwestbury 3y ago
      Membership is a hook -- once you have a member, they're more likely to buy from you. It's not really a marketing channel, per se, but it is a method of increasing sales. "Marketing" gets kind of murky at the edges, really. Consider Pike Place Fish Market in Seattle, who are famous for their fish-throwing, but have never actually spent anything on advertising -- are they marketing or not?