https://twitter.com/DavidSacks/status/804922277842272256
We also know both are right-leaning and I wonder how much of that factored in to the firing of the human rights, ethics, accessibility etc teams. The teams they may not appreciate but advertisers absolutely did.
There are endless legitimate criticisms of social media, moderation, the companies that dominate our online landscape, &c.. But nothing in terms of opacity and sheer unaccountable power compares to this.
Very few seem to have noticed that Parker Conrad built Rippling after Zenefits and David Sacks ran Zenefits to literally nothing (Valued less than what they raised even in 2021).
Rippling: valued at 11B (Raised 700M)
Zenefits: valued at 200M (Raised 600M).
Edit: Added numbers. Grammer.
The advertisers clearly didn't really care, or the impression price would have at least been comparable to Facebook — infamously a "brand safety" disaster, yet somehow far more effective at getting advertisers to pay.
It's why Musk's actions (or more likely David/Jason) have been so incompetent. Because now those advertisers have nothing but reasons not to come back.
I just don't want people to pretend that pre-Musk Twitter had any idea how to competently sell ads. They didn't.
Retailers, CPGs and other brands as well as many ad agencies and data science companies in the retail use the Twitter APIs to data-mine tweets for analysis often hand in hand with the promotion, ad or engagement campaigns that they or their clients are running.
On other platforms you often only get a binary match with a certain level of confidence to a sale as you can’t easily get what people are talking about.
With Twitter being primarily a public platform you can get much more than has a person bought an item within X hours/days of having an ad served to them.
So the “marketing” spend on Twitter is split often between servings ads and consuming the analytics API, and the latter is used more often however it’s only valuable as long as brands advertise and directly engage with users on the platform.
This is also why advertisers dropping Twitter as a platform is worse than just lost ad revenue since it also harms their only other major revenue stream.
(source: worked there a long time before Sacks entered, til after he left.)
From HN guidelines: Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.