The Twitter Advertiser Exodus

The people claiming that Twitter still being up proves they were vastly bloated need to read the following paragraphs until they &quot;sink in&quot;:<p>&gt; Our entire account team turned over multiple times in 2 weeks. We had multiple people (AE, AM, analyst, creative specialist) supporting our account and they all vanished without so much as an email. We finally got an email with a name for an AM last week but they quit and we don’t have a new one yet.<p>&gt; Ads UI is very buggy and login with SSO and 2FA broken. One of my campaign managers logged in last week and found all our paused creatives from the past 6 years had been reactivated. Campaign changes don’t save. These things cost us real money.

The attention economy seems to be &quot;forcing&quot; people to jump to conclusions as fast as possible to write that viral post &quot;X is dead&quot;, &quot;goodbye Y&quot;, etc.<p>You can&#x27;t just call for a business model change after only two weeks of such a radical management change. Twitter positioning is very strong and there is no real alternative&#x2F;competitor. If users keep using Twitter advertisers will come back.<p>It is tiring and makes seemingly smart people look dumb.

I don&#x27;t know how this ongoing &quot;Twitter revolution&quot; is going to turn out (out of pessimism, I bet the likelyhood of success is 3:7) but it does seem that musk et al. at least diagnosed correctly when saying that Twitter needs to find new revenue sources (other than ads) - NOT because there&#x27;s anything inherently bad with ad money (there is!) - but because it is now clear that advertisers were not sticky on Twitter ad platform since they are so ready to jump ship en mass within weeks.<p>I have long heard about the idea of the great deception that is online advertisement despite the fact that in last couple of decades people have argued of how effective it is and how critical&#x2F;unavoidable it is to advertise on certain platforms. It seems clear now that Twitter at least is not a critical platform for many brands.

This is just a second hand rehash of an anonymous and unverifiable comment on Blind. If there&#x27;s a real adverising exodus, there must be better sources than that.

I remember advertiser exodus from YouTube and advertiser exodus from Facebook, twice. They returned, eventually.<p>The bigger problem is current recession. Budgets for ads are cut first.

Unlike with engineering, there&#x27;s very little practical or deep articles about issues like brand safety, etc. and most people seem like parroting the same arguments without anyone explaining why this is the case.<p>You can build Twitter clone from scratch without knowing anything about IT at the beginning and learn it on the process but you can&#x27;t learn much about brands or advertising or marketing except for some high level talks.<p>I have no idea how so many people can analyse the Twitter ad situation, is everyone well versed in these topics?

Man. If you had told teenage me that on the 2022 equivalent of slashdot, tech folks would attack a communications platform for offending the sensibilities of <i>Fortune 500 advertisers</i>, I wouldn’t have believed you.

&quot;A large coalition of political&#x2F;social activist groups agreed not to try to kill Twitter by starving us of advertising revenue if I agreed to this condition.<p>They broke the deal.&quot; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;elonmusk&#x2F;status&#x2F;1595196519598080000" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;elonmusk&#x2F;status&#x2F;1595196519598080000</a><p>The condition he&#x27;s referring to is the moderation council he had announced. Apparently they demanded a council, he agreed, announced it, and then they pressured advertisers anyway?

I don&#x27;t buy it. Ok, I&#x27;m not a veteran ad spender, but the claim that after two weeks on Elon-Twitter the metrics shifted so drastically that it wasn&#x27;t worth it doesn&#x27;t make sense to me. If anything there&#x27;s more eyeballs on Twitter than before.

This post seems to suggest that the demand for Elon-Twitter failure continues to outstrip supply.

Elon has managed to lower everyones expectations on outcomes that if Twitter is still up next year and not bankrupt he will still have credibility.<p>I think this thing is going to turn around in 3 months if it makes through these rocky waters. Whether the product is the same and we like it TBD

The advertisers will return eventually. I&#x27;m anti-elon and anti-twitter, but as much as I would love to indulge in the schadenfreude, the collapse of twitter seems totally unrealistic.

Catarina left this as a comment to the post:<p>I <i>definitely</i> hope that Twitter can find a better business model than advertising, which I think is fee for service. That has always been the best way, especially for social media. All the disinformation, the serotonin economy, the harassment, the impersonation–ALL the ills are reduced with a fee for service model.

I&#x27;m really interested in how this will turn out. If he manage to improve Twitter after so many laid off I&#x27;ll never take any big tech employee seriously ever again.

People speak as if twitter isn&#x27;t going to hire more employees. Obviously they can&#x27;t sustain themselves on the crew they have now long term. They have to realize this and they&#x27;ll probably start hiring as needed.

Tesla doesn’t spend money on advertising. It might be time to change that?

Software services are like puppies. Leave the house and everything is fine. For a while.

So basically these companies are proving allegiance to a single political agenda. If you don’t censor those who are critical of people in power, (but only on behalf our specific friends who are in power) then we pull your funding. This has got to be the most unsettling thing I’ve seen in a long time, maybe ever.

Wow! 80M a year in ad spend for a midsized b2b company...

Just remember we are all dead in 100 years.