The IT Nerd

Linda Yaccarino hasn’t taken over as Twitter CEO yet. Though that might happen sooner than expected. Regardless, she will have to clean up one major mess that Elon Musk has created for her. Which is advertising on Twitter is down:

Elon Musk recently said Twitter’s advertising business was on the upswing. “Almost all advertisers have come back,” he asserted, adding that the social media company could soon become profitable.

But Twitter’s U.S. advertising revenue for the five weeks from April 1 to the first week of May was $88 million, down 59 percent from a year earlier, according to an internal presentation obtained by The New York Times. The company has regularly fallen short of its U.S. weekly sales projections, sometimes by as much as 30 percent, the document said.

That performance is unlikely to improve anytime soon, according to the documents and seven current and former Twitter employees.

For a business that largely relies on advertising, and with the fact that Twitter Blue which was supposed to replace advertising revenue is a failure of epic proportions, that’s not good news. Neither is this:

Some of Twitter’s biggest advertisers — including Apple, Amazon and Disney — have been spending less on the platform than last year, three former and current Twitter employees said. Large specialized “banner” ads on Twitter’s trends page, which can cost $500,000 for 24 hours and are almost always bought by large brands to promote events, shows or movies, are often going unfilled, they said.

And this:

Six ad agency executives who have worked with Twitter said their clients continued to limit spending on the platform. They cited confusion over Mr. Musk’s changes to the service, inconsistent support from Twitter and concerns about the persistent presence of misleading and toxic content on the platform.

I honestly have no idea how Yaccarino fixes this. She can make all the promises that she wants to big advertisers and ad agencies that Twitter is going to be a better place to advertise with her running the show. But Elon’s behaviour and the fact that Twitter is a toxic swamp of hate and bigotry is going send those promises to the bin. Yaccarino may want to keep her CV updated because I suspect that she might be heading to the exits once she figures out that this is a Kobayashi Maru scenario.

This entry was posted on June 5, 2023 at 9:01 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Twitter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.