Hacker News Reader

Comment by andreyk | Hacker News Reader

Yep, agree. Twitter's revenue was primarily from ads, and now I'd bet their ads revenue has dropped a huge amount. Given how Musk is behaving now (reinstating Trump etc.), and losing many pivotal sales people, and the firing of a ton of people in charge of dealing with hate speech and such, it seems unlikely advertisers will return now.

View on HN

advertisers wont care in a couple months. the situation has lots of public attention now, which is what the advertisers are actually afraid of. They don't want their brand associated with the craziness. They don't actually care one way or the other about any choice musk makes. They're not going to just walk away from a 300+ million person audience permanently just due to principles

No but if there is no content moderation and Twitter becomes even more of an open cesspit than it already was, announcers are going to stay away because most of them do not want to be associated with toxicity. Perhaps politically active organizations will want to be there (e.g. the NRA or the ACLU), but nothing family-friendly (e.g. Disney) and most likely nothing Christmas-y during Christmas season.

Only if ill-intended parties pressure those advertisers and effectively threaten them with that bad publicity for sticking around. It changes the game when there is coercion by third parties who are more than happy to see Twitter collapse if it isn't governed by their desired policies and worldviews.

Okay, name an advertiser-sponsored website that’s not moderated.

Forcing advertisers away in that method is also illegal however. It's called "tortious interference".

And yet it has happened with great regularity. YouTube alone has been the site of numerous such advertiser withdrawals, so much so that its users coined a name for them, 'Adpocalypses'. It is often journalistic enterprises who see fit to gin up the severity of the content and to target any advertiser for coercion whose ad appears on a given 'problematic' video.

Why would that be?

If Twitter becomes (even more) a platform for hate (or at least "highly militant") speech, placing ads on Twitter, especially close to said hate speech becomes bad publicity, regardless of third parties. If you ware placing an ad for a mattress or a family movie, would you like it to be seen by people who are in the middle of a flamewar?

I don't presume to be an expert on how reader sentiment colors an ad view. But it would surprise me if it had as big an impact as people claim, or if people actually think the advertiser is picking a side or condoning bigotry, for example. We are used to seeing unfitting advertising strewn across the web, for better or worse, without correlating it with the subject material of the page. It would at worst devalue the ad space for being poorly targeted.

Furthermore, you would need to supply evidence that hate speech is more prevalent instead of merely fearmongering that it is allowing such.

> I don't presume to be an expert on how reader sentiment colors an ad view. But it would surprise me if it had as big an impact as people claim, or if people actually think the advertiser is picking a side or condoning bigotry, for example. We are used to seeing unfitting advertising strewn across the web, for better or worse, without correlating it with the subject material of the page.

That's entirely possible. I'm certain that big brands know better than me.

> It would at worst devalue the ad space for being poorly targeted.

Isn't this kinda synonymous with what I was claiming? Or are you saying that big ad spenders would come back but only if Twitter lowered its pricing? It's pretty clear that Twitter will do the latter, so we'll see about the impact.

> Furthermore, you would need to supply evidence that hate speech is more prevalent instead of merely fearmongering that it is allowing such.

Did I claim that?

> Or are you saying that big ad spenders would come back but only if Twitter lowered its pricing?

Yes, that. Perhaps with stabilized trust they could lift prices back up.

> Did I claim that?

I think I addressed your 'if' as a 'since'; my mistake.

Where do people get the "no content moderation" idea from? Musk has been talking about how to remove hate speech etc recently.

At this stage, I have no clue whether there is or will be content moderation in three months time. By now, Musk has said many, many things, often contradictory. Some of these tweets may turn into facts but I doubt Musk himself knows which ones.

I stand by my earlier claim: if there is no (or not enough) content moderation, most advertisers will not return. If there is, they may.

They might if other channels aren't saturated and things are still in flux. Kanye was unbanned yesterday. Do you think he's going to behave better or worse than before? If he behaves worse then that's another headline, another news cycle about whether he should be banned or not.

Right now the trend is advertisers getting more spooked because of unpredictability and Musk being unable to reassure them in calls he has been reported to have been on. I expect this trend to continue

Musk says he had no role in bringing Kanye West back on Twitter

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/kanye-west-back-twitter-aft...

Surgeon General Warning: Attempting to keep track or make sense of anything Elon Musk says is hazardous for your mental health.

I don’t think given their ad sales that the sales people were that pivotal.

As I understand it, most of the ad slots were sold at a yearly sales event. This time most advertisers were cautious because the company couldn't respond to questions of how Elon Musk's takeover would affect the company (and specifically the type of content alongside which the ads would appear) as this was happening before he took over but after the sale was practically a done deal. This left them with only a fraction of the ad slots "pre-sold" compared to a normal year.

Additionally it seems a lot of advertisers have cautioned their ad departments to halt spending on Twitter ads for now because they're still unclear about wtf Elon Musk is up to (not to mention the mass impersonation fiasco that allegedly resulted in share prices of several companies being affected negatively).

It's not just sales people, Twitter seems to have gotten rid of most of its external communications people to the point where journalists can't even find anyone to ask for statements other than Elon Musk himself (which may be intentional given that he likes to present himself as the face of his companies).

But if Twitter's ad sales really did rely so much on these sales events, I'd wager that the sales people largely existed to communicate directly with long-standing big-spend advertising partners. It's hard to overstate how much these types of deals hinge on "social glue" rather than cold hard numbers (which can be interpreted/reframed to be interpreted however you want as long as both sides are happy).

  "Additionally it seems a lot of advertisers have cautioned their ad departments to halt spending"

What percentage? Big difference between 0.03 and 0.3.

Well it's all rumors, but if the news was good then Elon would be trumpeting it from the hilltops since his brand and the company's depends on the perception of his business acumen. He's certainly trying to do that[1] whereas the response has been lukewarm. Meanwhile, his people with direct relations to the major ad buyers are getting fired[2], and the handling of the relationships with industry groups seems poor[3].

The issue is Twitter under it's current debt burden can't afford to lose any of its advertisers. It needed to find a $1 billion of savings somewhere to keep the deal viable, and not lose any advertising revenue. Due to the acquisition that's off the board entirely due to tanking their guaranteed revenue[4] to the tune of $600-900 million, and since then Musk has done almost everything possible to drive away ongoing spend. So at this point, Twitter is in the hole to at least $600 million of revenue, bringing their minimum current loss for this year up to ~$1.5 billion. If you needed to explain one thing, it's that the massive quick firings were a desperate move to not lose money on that, but it's a false economy and Elon's being ruining any gains by continuing to make moves which seem like they're hemorrhaging even more ad-dollars.

[1] https://fortune.com/2022/11/10/advertisers-unconvinced-after...

[2] https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/18/23467324/twitter-ad-sale...

[3] https://edition.cnn.com/2022/11/01/tech/elon-musk-twitter-ad...

[4] https://www.businessinsider.com/activists-urging-brands-stop...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com