* Audi
* GM
* General Mills
* L'Oreal
* Pfizer
* Volkswagen
You then have Interpublic and WPP telling their clients to pause ads.
People really don't understand the power imbalance. Twitter desperately needs these advertisers but for these brands the ad spend is in low single digits and the possibility of harming their brand just simply isn't worth it.
What percent of Twitter's revenue did these advertisers make up?
The whales that for a company like Twitter would be a large percentage of their revenue.
I don’t think there’s a difference between “we say we’re trying and are completely incompetent” and whatever Twitter is doing now.
This way, if nothing happens, they can always come back silently (or spinning the story in a way they want). If some PR disaster happens, they are safely away from it.
For me, this was to be expected and is a testament of how important Twitter has become in the marketing world that it isn't bleeding out advertisers even quicker.
Boring Co used SpaceX and Tesla engineers for preliminary engineering work (and also for the Vegas tunnel) without reimbursing either company, and Boring Co used SpaceX's Hawthorne parking lot for its original test tube without leasing the land. BoringCo has not paid for the Teslas it uses, it received them for free. (As Tesla claims not to spend any money on marketing, giving these Teslas could not have been a marketing expense for Tesla unless they deliberately misrepresenting their financial statements, which is an entirely separate can of worms.)
Tesla didn't pay SpaceX to send a Tesla into space. (See above.)
Twitter used Tesla engineers, without reimbursement, to evaluate code just last week.
From what I understand, they are going to wait until it's clear how much of a conflict of interest him being CEO of Twitter (in terms of advertising) + Tesla is.
why would it be a conflict of interest, unless the CEO of twitter is deliberately stopping car companies from advertising on twitter?
They don't have to start advertising, because they have never had to buy ads, people are willing to talk about them for free, and a lot of that discourse was due to Musk's tweets.
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Why didn't Tesla buy Twitter? Why could Tesla start spending massive amounts of money on Twitter Ads if it couldn't buy it?
SolarCity was in a related field, which was at least a fig leaf or minimal justification. There's no real justification to buy Twitter or buy ad space on Twitter.
Elon is not actually the god emperor of Tesla. He's been able to sell all of his decisions as improving the future of Tesla (and thus humanity). Of course I could be completely wrong here; I don't have a crystal ball.
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I think about how we might get to a post-scarcity society, and what post-scarcity means. People like Gene Roddenberry have done a great job portraying this future, but not how we get there.
Much of our political discourse is between people who disagree about whether or not we are living in a time of scarcity or post-scarcity. Many people in the city live in the low-scarcity mindset. Many people in the country live in a scarcity mindset. This isn't determinative, it's relative. Just being one place or the other does not dictate how you view the world, but it is indicative.
We don't talk about scarcity directly in political speech. It's a deep assumption about the world. It's so deep you may not have even realized that you had taken a side before now.
Are taxes and economic activity a zero-sum game? Obviously the other side is wrong, why would you even entertain the question?
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Why the fuck did I bring up Star Trek and post-scarcity? Because Twitter is a place where fights happen. I'm very happy that people are sending tweets instead of bombs, but we have to continue advancing our level of discourse, and I'm not at all convinced that online public speech is the way to do that; I'm especially not convinced that we can do that in short form; and I'm especially especially convinced that the process of advancing the discourse will not be funded by ads.
Literally no one I know with Teslas (and it's many many) even using Twitter.
Furthermore, there are many other high-profile companies that are extremely well known that simply opt not to advertise. Look at Costco. There's no Twitter mouthpiece and no advertising yet everyone either shops there or knows about it, but doesn't shop there.
I could believe, maybe, 'millions'. A hundred thousand dollars buys you a lot of ads on twitter.
The next time I have to buy a car, my decision to buy or not a Tesla will be heavily influenced by the information I already have, which comes from there (obviously, I'll also take other things into account and even pay a visit to the dealer - but still, I wouldn't consider it if nobody told me anything about the brand).
[edit: hedge between 12M and 13M]
Sure, “the bird” will be free, in a sense, when it’s profitable and doesn’t care about advertisers, but that freedom is free for Elon to do whatever he wants with it.
Not freedom for users or in any other (actually good) sense of that bloated meaningless word.
An ad-independent revenue source is a good idea, but not the blue checkmark program, as it currently means some kind of identity verification, and 'random' folks having it may cause problems:
> Want to call yourself Citibank Password Verification? Here's your blue tick, thanks for the $8. Want to say you're the Democratic Party of Wisconsin and announce you're abolishing the police? $8. Call yourself WXBM Local News Arkansas and invent a school shooting? Yours for $8
> Trump is banned? No problem, you can be Trump for 8 dollars, verified by Twitter. Or you can be Barron Trump and "expose the dark truth about your parents". Whatever. Go mad.
* https://twitter.com/ariehkovler/status/1588306300450263041
No. Many random people have been given blue ticks. Some people happen to just wake up and have a blue tick. I doubt many celebs went through the process of identity verification.
Journalists basically get it for free regardless of their journalistic ability or follower count. They could sign up to Twitter after getting a job at CNN and get blue tick.
Blue tick as it is right now is an abused meaningless system now.
That's OK. Twitter verification was "Twitter verified this person's identity", not "this person asked Twitter to verify their identity". Twitter can and should do so proactively in scenarios like this.
> Journalists basically get it for free regardless of their journalistic ability or follower count.
Yes, they're one of the specific categories permitted to apply laid out at https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/about-twit....
One of the fundamental misunderstandings comes from the fact that one's usage of a site like Twitter is generally worth more to the ad-buying community than to the users themselves. This is why Facebook, arguably the strongest social platform, does not charge its users.
Also, users create the content so charging them means you have less inventory to sell.
But $8 for a blue checkmark and ads? No thank you. I will certainly not pay a company that still treats me like a commodity if I can avoid it.
The $8 is for algorithmic juice for your tweets and half the normal ads, as well as the blue check.
People are not that stupid
A lot of these low prices are subsidized by venture capital as the companies chase market share.
For example, Spotify is ludicrously underpriced. Less than 10 bucks a month to hear basically every song ever recorded? Not sure that can last.
[0] https://soundcharts.com/blog/music-streaming-rates-payouts
[1] https://www.musicweek.com/digital/read/spotify-tells-competi...
When it launched, it had to compete with "free" via piracy.
They’d need something like 20% of what Musk claims is their fake, bot-inflated mDAU—far more than existing blue checks, Blue subscribers, and “heavy tweeters” combined—subscribed at $8 to substitute for advertisers.
Sorry if I am being dangerous/spreading misinformation, just asking the question
The reverse is quite clear in how various Gulf states like Qatar buy lots of advertising for the state as a whole .. with the unspoken assumption that their poor human rights record won't be mentioned as much.
How are advertisers blackmailing Twitter?
They sell medicine, people don't pick what medicine they get for the most part, their doctor does. (yes there are exceptions) The number of people who would push back against a medicine because "pfizer had ads next a twitter post with racial epithets" seem vanishingly small.