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Comment by threeseed | Hacker News Reader

I think this is a large part of it: https://twitter.com/GoAngelo/status/1588696157794242560

Apparently, Twitter instantly lost ~15% of their 2023 revenue because of their poor showing at NewFronts where a lot of upfront ad buying is done. And with Musk firing the very teams the advertisers care about e.g. ethics, brand safety, human rights the industry is turning against them. Decade of painstaking work by Twitter to attract these advertisers gone in a week. And even worse Musk fired many of the relationship managers and so the company can't smooth things over.

It really isn't inconceivable with this trajectory that Musk could bankrupt the company within a year.

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Elon is understanding why Twitter had to seem so "woke". It turns out that "woke" consumers make for the most lucrative demographic to serve ads to. I don't believe he had to reckon with advertiser psychology to this extent at Tesla or SpaceX.

Usually it's not woke so much as blandly inoffensive. Think Disney.

> It turns out that "woke" consumers make for the most lucrative demographic to serve ads to.

Does this mean that “woke” people are people that work hard and have money to spend, while the non “woke” dont? What does this say about the “non woke” crowd?

What is even woke?

Am i “woke” because i don't want to buy products advertised on a platform where people are insulted on a daily basis due race, gender or sexual orientation and i want people to freely express their personality without risk of verbal or written injury?

Is it maybe that brands understood that being associated with the types that loiter our social networks and scream abuse at passers does not sit well with sane people like us?

A combination of (0) having disposable income, as you said, but also (1) lots of free time to browse social media, which in combination with making money might mean maybe not working so hard; (2) low enough standards to spend a lot of free time on social media, and in case of twitter probably not "connecting with family back home"; (3) suggestible/gullible enough to click on ads instead of doing product research; (4) not technically competent enough to just block ads; (5) maybe, conspicuous-consumption/status/consumerism focused enough to buy the kind of high-margin products that justify ads.

How these are weighted I dunno. But yeah, sounds pretty much like chattering class ;)

I wouldn't expect working hard to correlate with having a lot of money. Plenty of poor people work hard. I also see your point that it doesn't make somebody a leftist or even necessarily progressive to be somewhat cautious of Twitter during a moment of relative upheaval. They are still a very small part of the digital advertising pie. And indeed there is some free marketing in deciding not to buy ads, when stories are written about that decision.

I don't think woke is the most lucrative demographic to serve ads to, but advertisers who buy ads on Twitter are likely selecting for Twitter. That is to say, Musk is destroying the Twitter branding, and so the advertisers that went to Twitter for its branding are now leaving.

Didnt Alex Jones prove otherwise?

That Twitter thread doesn’t say that they lost this revenue. Just that they didn’t get the early commitment.

NewFronts was in May 2022.

So I think we can safely assume that since things have gotten nothing but worse for Twitter since that they didn't book those commitments. In fact we have seen a large exodus of those exact type of advertisers in recent days.

It really does look like Parag may have slipped Musk a poison pill.

If Twitter hasn't been profitable for years, and is losing 4 million a day then aren't they already bankrupt?

Some of it was an accounting loss as I understand it. Eg last year they lost $200m-ish, but $600m of that was stock-based compensation. So they were cash flow positive.

Of course taking a company private means you can't use the market to pay your employees...

They weren't losing as much in the past as they are now.

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