The Twitter Advertiser Exodus
caterina.net
caterina.net
> Our entire account team turned over multiple times in 2 weeks. We had multiple people (AE, AM, analyst, creative specialist) supporting our account and they all vanished without so much as an email. We finally got an email with a name for an AM last week but they quit and we don’t have a new one yet.
> Ads UI is very buggy and login with SSO and 2FA broken. One of my campaign managers logged in last week and found all our paused creatives from the past 6 years had been reactivated. Campaign changes don’t save. These things cost us real money.
It's perfectly natural for an engineer to de-value B2B relations - I expect it, but at the same time that's the grain of salt we should take when we read an engineer's hot takes.
Except didn't he fire them too?
Keeping Twitter up is not success for Elon
He needs to make it worth well more than the $44bn he paid for it in order to achieve anything resembling success; the Twitter is going to crash thing was just a dumb hashtag, no one believed that he's just let it go down and stay down.
what would that even look like? Yet, not achieving that insane failure is now what people cite as success.
I understand people hope it will fail, because they don't want to admit how useless much of the staff these big tech companies have accumulated over the years are to the core products. But, you will only be setting yourself up for disappointment. Elon has done much more impressive things with a small team of "hardcore" engineers (as he puts it). I think many sticking around are the type not to shy away from a challenge, though again I understand many are not in a position to be playing competing in the workplace.
Of course, if you were vital to Twitter, then you likely left before he took over.
Because you could. Plenty of people would rather have severance.
I base this on experience. I was a consultant so I did what all good consultants do when holding together a sinking ship: I doubled my rates. Twice.
You are missing out some important nuance there: no one said it would fall off the earth immediately, that it would cease to function right now. Many, myself included, have said we think it can't function long term, or even medium term, like this.
Day to day running of the main app is all automated when things are OK so it will keep ticking over as long as someone says the infrastructure invoices. The real test comes when there is next an infrastructure issue or some other fault: are the right sort of people there to resolve it quickly? Also do they have a good combination of people around to work on those bugs those advertisers are concerned about and other maintainence & improvement (of both the app and the other infrastructure it and the company relys upon)?
If we get rid of all car mechanics your car won't break down immediately, but good look getting it sorted easily when it eventually does develop a fault.
Twitter was somewhat bloated, I agree there. But what has happened to it in recent weeks is far more damaging than that could ever have been. It needs to turn around very quickly to survive financially and technically, and I think the chances of that happening are small.
Quite a few people said that it would crash essentially immediately.
Which… by all evidence he has. The corpse of Twitter might shamble on for awhile. He might even sell it down the line for pennies on the dollar. But he’s got to turn a billion in profit just to pay down the debt. Best of luck with that.
This is very disingenuous, there were hordes of people claiming it would be down in 24 hours, 48 hours, after the weekend etc. and there are still masses of people still saying it won’t last two weeks. At this point so many people have cried wolf loudly and repeatedly that I think the best option is to believe no one unless they are reporting first hand facts that can be independently verified. Everything else is just hot air.
> > You are missing out some important nuance there: no one said it would fall off the earth immediately,
> This is very disingenuous,
Fair, I matched hyperbole (the implication that a majority were saying something) with hyperbole (staying no one was).
Let's go with no one with a clue who is unbiased by direct connection.
> there were hordes of people claiming it would be down in 24 hours, 48 hours, after the weekend etc
If this pot may comment on the a kettle's underside for a moment: "hordes" may be as disingenuous "no one". It was said by some angrily¹ on their way out and repeated and amplified by the mob that is Twitter² users.
And that outgoing team didn't say it would fall down in any time frame IIRC: just that things could not run without them. I would read this as a medium/long term view, the social media amplifier read it as "it dies in 3, 2, ...".
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[1] rightly so, but the emotion does reduce the ability to maintain objective reasoning
[2] one of the selection of reasons I have for not using Twitter aside from occasionally looking at a message linked elsewhere: it is too full of certain types who think Twitter is a good idea!
My money is on certs for critical services expiring.
Twitter is a glorified message board. You don't need more than 50 engineers to oversee that. Wasn't instagram and whatsapp overseeing >250m DAU with around that many engineers before their acquisitions?
The hard part is monetizing.
What was the revenue Instagram and Whatsapp were collecting at the time of their acquisition? Likely 0.
The moment you start collecting money, signing contracts, besides the non engineering work like legal and finance, not to mention sales, you will need to do a lot of tracking whether you delivered what you claimed you sold.
Didnt Facebook get in trouble for exaggerating ad metrics?
And that's on top of all sorts regional compliance requirements over GDPR, cookies, which require both engineers building stuff as specified by legal, which wasnt required before because if you have no revenue, you dont really need to worry about getting sued or banned in the region.
Twitter-as-140-characters-shouted-into-the-ether can be 'built in a weekend'. Twitter-as-a-business-that-makes-money is an entirely different machine.
As Elon Musk Cuts Costs at Twitter, Some Bills Are Going Unpaid - https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/22/technology/elon-musk-twit...
> ...
> Mr. Musk also issued an order to slow or in some cases halt transfers of funds to Twitter’s vendors and contract services, the people said. Any expenditures for services need to be approved by Mr. Birchall, three people said. Mr. Musk has since declined to pay for the travel services incurred by the former Twitter executives, the people said.
> ...
> Mr. Davis, the president of the Boring Company, has also directed Twitter employees to renegotiate the deals that the company has with firms such as Amazon and Oracle, which provide computing and tech services, the people said. The employees were told to suggest to those companies that Mr. Musk’s firms would not work with them in the future if they refused to renegotiate, the people said.
> After Twitter’s contract with one software vendor expired under Mr. Musk’s ownership, that company voided a discount it had given to Twitter, one engineering manager said.
Hating on Twitter has become just another political in-group signal. Yawn.
Again, what does this even look like? Twitter.com returns 404 and everyone gives up?
At least make straw man arguments that are reasonable.
I have no private insight to his motives, but profitability / vanity / dozens of other motives seem a lot more likely to me than spending $44 billion to fix a censorship problem, even if that does make for (selectively) good marketing.
A week later (April 11th), he decided not to join the board because he wouldn't be able to exceed a 14.9% cap.
Three days later, he makes a meme-ish offer of $54.20 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1514698036760530945
Side bit look at the stock prices and volumes - https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/TWTR/history/
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I suspect that both the "this is the backout penalty" and the SEC looking closely at him for trying to manipulate the price of Twitter discouraged him from backing out.
He was able to use it as an opportunity to sell some other significant amounts of stock as part of the "I am going to buy Twitter" that he would likely have been able to keep as cash if he was able to successfully back out of buying Twitter (though he's containing to sell stock).
https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/08/business/elon-musk-tesla-stoc...
It was a terrible business deal if your concern was profit. Even Musk says he overpaid, and the previous investors of Twitter were clearly eager to get out of that investment, going to court to force Musk to buy it.
If you read the text messages between Musk and Ellison, which came out as part of the trial, Ellison was offering Musk basically any amount of money, a blank check. Why?
For those that think Twitter is going to crash, are you on the right?
I encounter way more people who hate scientology than people who praise it, that seems consistent with the cult label.
I'd be curious to know some of the "irrational" reasons people dislike Musk, I think people's dislike of him is pretty understandable: he's a dishonest businessman and a partisan troll.
I'm certain nobody likes those vaguely described bad things and would agree those "substantively worse" things are worse. So what? The topic is Elon and thus we see people's reaction to Elon.
Unfortunately, it became not just politicized but partisan. Republicans 'like' him and Democrats do not.
War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength, hate is healthy?
How is it "healthy"? Sitting there hating some random person you don't know "more and more everyday"? That sounds like someone who needs therapy or, at least, a new hobby.
Musk lost quite of non-fanboy supporters though, over they years he did things that not everyone can stomach. No one forgot his pedo guy accusation for the diver who saved the kids from a cave in Thailand.
These things are not connected, it actually makes no sense to say that. I know many more Musk haters than fans but at least 2 of the fans I know are definitely into the Musk-cult where they believe everything Musk does is great, that he has no flaws and any perceived flaw is just a tactic for him to get even further. They really do subscribe to the Musk 4D-5D chess stuff.
That's a cult behaviour, they are just into the personality of Elon Musk with no regards to his actions. The successful outcomes of Musk validates, to them, anything he does, like he is an infallible demi-God.
That's the cult thing.
Really not sure why you are conflating with how many hate or love him, there's no connection to that, at all.
If they're boasting about anything, it's that Twitter is getting more users, is faster, and there's less hate. Before Elon, Twitter was a place where employees were paid $180k to endlessly redesign icons and have DEI meetings. The new Twitter is a lot leaner.
https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-payroll-finance-depa...
Yeah, to the point that they fire employees on the spot for providing factual information.
If they were to have a seriously catastrophic incident, it's conceivable that they might not have anyone left who knows how to get things back online. It's not inconceivable that they could eventually figure it out, but without that essential knowledge, who knows how long that could take? I imagine it would be pretty bad for Twitter's future if the site were unavailable for days or weeks on end.
Twitter is a quite complex distributed system, as good as geohot is he's just a guy, with one brain, capable of holding a limited amount of information and context at a time. There's no way that one guy, no matter how good, can actually completely reason about all aspects of a complex system.
Even less in 12 weeks, that's actually absurdly preposterous.
SpaceX Dragon: https://twitter.com/ashleevance/status/1593133313484787713
Optimism: https://twitter.com/jinglejamOP/status/1310718738417811459
I do think Twitter is likely to crash. A machine can continue for a while if you stop maintenance, but at some point you'll run into a problem that needs intervention, and Twitter has lost enough of the people who know how things work that there's a good chance they'll have a serious outage.
The Internet is big and full of people.
Is it actually the same people changing their predictions as time and evidence accumulate, or is it just a change in who gets attention?
You can fire everyone and fully re-staff the firm, and eventually get to the point where you can do all of those things safely. But it's going to take a hell of a long time and downtime to shake out all the things that can go wrong in the myriad of unplanned interactions between different services.
I don't expect Twitter to crash and burn in the sense of the website being down and not coming back up. But I do expect feature velocity to grind to a halt, until all of these self-inflicted wounds are staunched.
But my original criticism was about all of the hysteria in the last two weeks about Twitter "going down". Those sky-is-falling tweets got very little pushback. The claim was not about profitability or advertising; there were only these shrill voices claiming the site would stop working. And when that didn't materialize, all the people making those claims just went about their business without any personal repercussions or call outs. It was all just motivated by irrational Musk hatred generated by politics. It had nothing to do with technology. You can still see these tweets right now, a lot of people didn't delete them when Twitter didn't burn.
I always held out the possibility that Twitter could die, but if it does it will be a slow death. It all depends on if the new payment model generates enough cash to offset advertising losses. So in that sense I agree with her conclusion.
The rest of Twitter is pretty solid. Why this? This is the money maker. Is it because product wanted the human touch of sales instead of self-serve?
>login with SSO and 2FA broken.
I believe this was the result of turning off the "get rid of all the microservices " directive Elon pushed. I don't think it was malicious; some badly name microservice that was probably in charge of sending text messages or generating session tokens was shut off and the dependency chain wasn't fully understood.
>AdsUI
Anyone spending enough money for Twitter to case likely has an account manager who does everything for them. Anything that isn't in the "happy path" of the AdsUI probably gets handled by some engineer making some API calls to a prod API because it's unique enough to not worry about putting AdsUI and urgent enough where someone had to take care of it now.
Did you miss the part where they are cycling through AMs several times a week? ("We had multiple people (AE, AM, analyst, creative specialist) supporting our account and they all vanished without so much as an email. We finally got an email with a name for an AM last week but they quit and we don’t have a new one yet.")
> Anything that isn't in the "happy path" of the AdsUI probably gets handled by some engineer making some API calls to a prod API because it's unique enough to not worry about putting AdsUI and urgent enough where someone had to take care of it now.
LOL who? They can't even hold on to undifferentiated sales people for more than a week at a time.
Prior to going private, Twitter would have had recurring Sarbanes-Oxley audits. Auditors understand the need for occasional emergency break-glass methods of making manual database queries or API calls, but they are less tolerant about that being a normal way of operating.
Plus, if you use emergency access often you'll eventually waste more time explaining each individual access to auditors at the end of the quarter than it would have taken to just implement a UI for the feature in a code-reviewed and audited internal admin console or user-facing UI.
Caveat: the Twitter nonsense has me using Twitter more than before. It’s like Cubhouse a year ago.
And it's mostly news about Twitter itself. It's hard to scroll without having people talk about Elon Musk. Had to unfollow him and still getting Elon related tweets, it's boring to say the least.
There are discussions around a WeChat-like "everything app" I can speculate that one of the "success" paths is to have that "everything" is somewhat built around Tesla, which is quite a pivot, but hey, don't you need a Tesla Assistant communicating with your friends and providing your news during the commute and for paying for coffee while AutoPilot guides you thought the boring tunnel!? And then selling it to Tesla and thus offloading some of his debt to Tesla shareholders (see SolarWorld)
Sure, will take a bit, especially so that SEC and other Tesla shareholders won't go after him, but an independent IPO seems far off.
I noticed that as well, was wondering if it was already there or not as I am not avid user of the DMs.
if all of those have somehow deteriorated in 1-2 weeks, this is further justification for axing the people who made them.
However, if shaving that 1h a week off takes more than 10 days of work, it is probably better to leave it as it is.
https://www.fincher.org/tips/General/SoftwareDevelopment/Bug...
This bug tracking works on Pain / Effort / Frequency and Risk / Effort / Verifiability
Realizing that I'm making up numbers here (and you can make them up too for the story we're telling each other):
Pain : 2 (low pain)
Effort : 2 (low effort)
Freq. : 4 (fairly often)
So, what's the risk of making the change to make it so that the sales person doesn't have to do that 1h/week task? How much effort does it take? How easy is it to verify that its actually working?
And so now we've got bugs where we can put them on a grid and say "these fixes are the low hanging fruit" while "these other ones are risky and don't get us much."
Its quite possible that that this issue would never get into the "this is painful and so we need to do the analysis for it" or "this is low hanging fruit that can be fixed and have a big impact on 'stuff'".
Nonetheless, you've got something that takes 1h/week from someone who knows what they're doing with their accounts... and they're not working there anymore. Even in a perfect org, this could fall apart rather quickly.
If Twitter stays up, it just shows that all those people were unnecessary, and he should have fired them.
This quote makes it sound as though they had an AE/AM visit them every week ? Most advertisers count themselves lucky to hear from the ads teams once a quarter outside regular scripted emails.
That....can't be coincidental, and smells an awful lot like fraud.
Note again: this is a few weeks BEFORE Elon took over. So yes its broken, I think they generally weren’t working particularly hard on it before either.
This happened to me as well. Absolutely wild and will go to my grave before paying a dime.
You can't just call for a business model change after only two weeks of such a radical management change. Twitter positioning is very strong and there is no real alternative/competitor. If users keep using Twitter advertisers will come back.
It is tiring and makes seemingly smart people look dumb.
Twitter doesn’t have a valid competitor though (no mastodon is not it) so Elon might end up pulling it off. I hope he doesn’t though and I’m going to do what it takes to influence that decision.
Wow. That’s a pretty mean-spirited way to go through life. Why not put your efforts into building something positive instead of trying to tear others down?
Also weird that people were both cheering for Elon to be forced to buy Twitter, then mad that he bought it.
Then cheering for Elon Twitter to fail (hoping for advertisers to leave even before any layoffs were announced) and then lambasting Elon for being so mean to lay off people (how can they stay employed if Twitter's revenue fails?). It's really weird.
Narcissist? The fact that he’s nominally head of 3 companies, trying to execute a dramatic turnaround on one in real time, but still tweets constantly.
Certainly, he has many positive attributes. But, quoting Steve Rogers, I don’t like bullies.
Neurotypicals (and those with higher social intelligence) know you're supposed to pretend to be nice to people who are mean to you.
I find amusing all the mental gymnastics Musk followers are doing these days. It does seem like a personality cult.
I used to look up to him, read one of his biographies, etc; Plenty to admire from his achievements, but his most recent toxic behaviour and shitty management style has really changed that.
Since his success metric for launching Tesla was the success of green tech itself rather than Tesla's market share and his goals for SpaceX were similarly broad rather than purely financial, making a point of trying to make him fail is also negatively aligned with long term civilizational outcomes. It would take a very petty person to hope that we go back to throwing away rockets after a single use, just because they have a beef with the person in and inspired others to build a reusable one.
If you feel that the 2018-2021 era version of Twitter was its ideal state, that's defensible even if a bit odd. But hoping a platform millions love fails, just because of the guy who bought it (and has a track record of doing great things for humanity), then your goal sucks.
I hope he fails hard at this and returns to making rockets. Tesla could disappear at this point and I don’t think it would matter, but SpaceX feels important still.
I think you should focus on what you want to make in the world rather than how to hurt others.
Even within the scope of companies to destroy, Twitter seems like an exceptionally poor target. Is Twitter really so much more threatening than Apple, Google, MS, FB, Tiktok, Tencent, any company marketing cigarettes etc, that it's worthy of setting aside all the productive things you can do with your life and make it your ambition to bring it down?
The amount of negative energy focused at it is downright pathological given its size and impacts, IMO.
“The problem with that goal…is that you'd be advocating for the end of adoption of electric vehicles and keeping humanity a single planet species forever”
I don’t care about Twitter itself, but I hope that Elon’s cruel and destructive approach fails.
And I’m not so entranced by his self-aggrandizing mythology that I think him failing at Twitter will have any impact whatsoever on adoption of electric vehicles or our ability to get to space. Give me a break lol
Cruel and destructive?
That’s quite the extreme and bizarre interpretation of recent events, and it’s not very charitable. I hope you find something a bit more positive to focus your energies on.
The truth is, neither of us can know what the long term consequences of the leadership change will be but it’s almost certainly not worth doing this to yourself over it.
Happy thanksgiving!
Even if you thought that we could become multi-planetary (incl. not just getting to other planets but living there in our current human form), thinking that Elon Musk is the only person on earth ever who could make this happen is pretty cultish. I mean, come on. Do you really believe he is humanity's savior?
Also, you completely missed the point. Since his ultimate goal with SpaceX is a multi-planetary future, the only way to make him “fail” at that goal is to ensure a single or zero-planetary future for humanity.
Seems kinda dark.
Please take a look at the HN guidelines. The personal swipe in your comment violates them.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine.
You are however redefining the meaning in this conversation or just not really aware that no one here wants that 'mission' to fail, we want Elon's methods to fail because they set a bad precedent for current and future leaders.
It's an unfortunate asymmetry.
If Twitter 2.0 succeeds, then ad-reliant "tech" businesses will be gutted and engineers freed to do more constructive things... if it fails, then one of the most toxic websites--toxic even before Elon, of course--might go under. But I think that's wishful thinking.
You confidently state that they’ll be back if there are users. That’s not true. They’ll be back if they think their RoI will be better than alternatives. And it’s unclear if Twitter is capable of providing more value than YouTube, Meta, TikTok etc.
Of course others used it too, but the 'news cachet' meant a lot too, and helped convince others to use it too. I could easily see journalists fears helping to keep the ugly bastard going. Glad I never wasted my time on it.
People seem to think Twitter is this almighty power that everyone was begging to work with but actually it's the opposite. Twitter was out there hustling for any relationship they could get.
Twitter had >5 billion in ad revenue. Facebook isnt the minimum threshold for good revenue.
It isn't a winner take all system. Meta might get the lions share, but that doesnt mean there is no room for competition.
Costs are adjusted to get similar ROI. Meta might get more clickthrough per add and command a higher price, but Twitter can compete with more adds for the same price, resulting in the same ROI.
Discord is the closest thing to a successful subscription only social media business. Compare what Nitro offers to Twitter Blue.
Twitter Blue is like buying the “I am rich” app while Discord Nitro solves actual customer pain points.
Discord has about 10% of their active users paying for Nitro by my calculation based on available information. Twitter getting anywhere close to that level is not likely. Discord has been building their service around paid features for years.
Luckily, Twitter has a large and skilled engineering team capable of quickly rolling out valuable new features to entirely change their business model!
(Sidenote: has anyone ever heard of a generally stable ~10 year IPOed tech company pivoting so drastically? It’s insane)
The RoI will be better than alternatives if Twitter ads are cheap enough. TikTok and possibly YouTube aren't profitable either, but they have inherently higher expenses. If Facebook and Instagram can be profitable, that means that there's a profitable company inside Twitter somewhere. I'm skeptical that Elon can achieve this, but that doesn'tean it's impossible.
Think about that: For 16 years Twitter management was so sclerotic that they were unable to perform basic improvements on targeting ads. Instead their focus was on trendy but money-losing projects like hexagonal profile pics for NFT users.
This is indicative of deep structural problems at Twitter, and won't be tolerated by Elon
This is a mobile app! You can get a coarse location, good enough to not show me an ad meant for an area 12000 km away. And yet, Twitter could not manage it.
That ISP wasted money by advertising on Twitter. Eventually other brands will realise this as well.
- twitch: parasocial/games - youtube: long videos/reviews - tiktok: short videos/random stuff/zoomers - facebook: friends/stalking/boomers ...
- twiter: microbloging/townhall/news
Totally different use cases with each having a clearly defined space (of course there is some overlap, it is all about human interaction after all).
Google tried this taking on Facebook. It didn't work because network effects cannot force someone to a new network. Heck, it almost killed YouTube in the process of getting Google+ their network.
Why does an advertiser go to Twitter over Meta or TikTok? That’s the real question to be asking.
I’d make the argument that the content format is very nearly irrelevant to the advertisers.
I can understand why an advertiser goes to Twitter instead of more defined niche ad platforms like Yelp, Google Maps, and iOS App Store.
What customer can be reached on Twitter that can’t be reached in Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok? In my mind, if advertisers are spooked by Twitter, they’ve got plenty of equivalent alternatives.
* Facebook/Meta: I'm a life long non-facebook user and never will use any facebook product.
* Reddit: I'm on Reddit and have been for a long time but moderators ban people on a whim constantly for the slightest disagreement. My primary account has been banned from several major subreddits for a long time. Any community that grows to any size becomes a cess pool. It also doesn't work for news, as news is delayed by up to a day before getting any kind of traction.
* Mastodon: Becoming a left wing echo chamber that mixes the worst parts of Reddit and the worst parts of Twitter.
* Truth Social: Don't get me started...
* Forums: I still use a number of site-dedicated forums.
Snapchat, TikTok, Hacker News, and LinkedIn are all social media sites. In the sense that you can only pay attention to one thing at a time, sure, these are competitors to Twitter.
But as far as actual content, value, or user experience, none of these are direct competitors. How exactly would the White House or your local school district go about making an announcement on TikTok?
In that sense, I think all the other major social media platforms are direct competitors to Twitter, probably better ones at that considering how often Twitter content is shared around as screenshots and quotes instead of funneling users into data-collecting apps.
The advertisers just want to get their message in front of someone who is paying attention and fits their desired attributes.
As the article points out, large enterprise clients require a human relationship and that’s something hard to provide with a massive staff cut.
They also don’t tolerate their brand being used alongside extreme content, and Twitter is telling the world that it’s going lax on moderation. Elon stated that directly in the recent tweet where he described the shadow banning process.
Twitter is looking at $1 billion a year just in interest payments, which is basically a 20% increase in total expenses compared to 2021, and they’re facing lower revenues.
No real alternative? Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Snap, Pinterest, YouTube, Reddit, Tumblr…
On top of that, any sales professional will tell you that competition includes doing nothing. Advertisers can just not spend and wait out the Twitter situation, especially during a recession.
Elon is going to need to show advertisers that he represents stable leadership rather than posting memes of women’s asses with Twitter logos on them. He’s not used to running a company where customers are buying a product that projects the customers’ own image into the world.
You know how Zuck is a boring G-rated robot? Advertisers love that.
For example today, I'm watching the World Cup.. Argentina just conceded a goal... I want to see reactions, memes, etc. Too soon for Youtube, uploading videos takes time, TikTok is too random.. Too soon for Tumblr and Pinterest.. Snap format is weird.. Reddit also might have something but I want a shorter format, reactions from known celebrities and sport commentators.. Instagram has some stuff but it is too picture centered... and then comes Twitter, exactly what I wanted, a quick fix of the now, some funny replies, I scroll a little bit, I go back to watching the match.
In the real world people are using Twitter the same as they were before Musk, and if the this trend doesn't change or even improves, advertisers will come back.
If there are eyeballs there are ads. It's a fact of nature (sadly).
Please tell me something that millions of people pay attention to daily that isn't plagued with ads.
The weather outside.
I have long heard about the idea of the great deception that is online advertisement despite the fact that in last couple of decades people have argued of how effective it is and how critical/unavoidable it is to advertise on certain platforms. It seems clear now that Twitter at least is not a critical platform for many brands.
https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/product/2021/introduci... https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/subscriptions
Maybe they really are going to stay off Twitter in particular.
Maybe leaving will noticeably hurt sales and they'll quietly come back in a month or two once the noise has died down.
Maybe they'll notice no impact to sales and experiment with pulling back from other social sites as well (lol I wish).
I think this is the most likely outcome. I'm not using socials anymore. Alphabet still gets my money hand over fist though :(
I barely used Twitter over the past 10ish years and I'm spending more time on it than ever right now.
For better or worse, the type of eyeballs also matter, increasingly so I'd say.
They were not sticky to Twitter, the platform, alone. But to Twitter, the platform, coupled with Twitter, the organization, and the high engagement of its relevant ad, sales and advertiser relationship teams.
Which is where Musk went wrong, because that was part of the company that he needlessly drove out. The exact opposite of bloat! At least until an equivalent revenue stream was secured.
You dont do this by first discarding all your existing revenue sources.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/11/22/twitter...
If he wants a free speech free for all ala 4chan, he’s going to have to find an entirely new way to monetize that doesn’t rely on ads.
That sounds to me like a flywheel of failure or a death spiral, self-inflicted.
Also… I think advertisers don’t want to be the spotlight, their job is to make their customers the spotlight. Publicly speaking out is likely a huge faux pas.
I used to get ads for Apple and Nike mostly with the odd thing in between.
I haven’t seen a Nike ad all week , but apple is showing up and tons more ads in asia showing up.
So I’m convinced there’s more ads than usual.
It's also possible you're in an A/B test to show a different ad volume.
In general sample size of 1 for ads (or feed ranking) is hard to reason about.
The bigger problem is current recession. Budgets for ads are cut first.
It's purely to do with Twitter not currently being able to run a competitive ad engine. And it ties directly with a large proportion of the engineers and data scientists being let go.
And given that there is a code freeze at the moment it's quite likely no updates are going out.
One thing we will find out - did they return on their own, or did they return because of persistent sales calls from FB and YT? Those are the part of the cuts - Twitter lost some very high profile relationships with brands that spend big. And it's reach/scale rarely justified dedicated campaigns - I'm sure most agencies are happy to not spend 20% of their time on 5% of their reach, compared to G and Meta.
Is this true? I've seen a lot of big budget ad investment from companies whose stocks have been tanking all year. It almost seems like they're trying to dig themselves out of a hole with marketing.
You can build Twitter clone from scratch without knowing anything about IT at the beginning and learn it on the process but you can't learn much about brands or advertising or marketing except for some high level talks.
I have no idea how so many people can analyse the Twitter ad situation, is everyone well versed in these topics?
Because if it has logic we can reason about it.
I know for a fact that all those brands actually do advertisement on some websites where horrible stuff are discussed.
Needless to say, those folks did not write much code and many got laid off. Others quit.
They also likely had tools to say "this screen shot from one of our testers put our content next to {objectionable figure} - make sure that this doesn't happen again" for advertisers to contact their account managers and make it happen.
The account managers were likely quite responsive if {jewish owned company advertising / verified} said that they were getting people replying back with antisemitic responses when customers were asking for support.
The advertisers had someone to contact and make things right - and were ok with that.
This need not be automatic.
https://twitter.com/CaseyNewton/status/1591608302076858371
> Getting word that a large number of number of Twitter contractors were just laid off this afternoon with no notice, both in the US and abroad. Functions affected appear to include content moderation, real estate, and marketing, among others
Note the "content moderation" and "marketing" categories of employees.
So it's not content moderation to enforce rules and such of the system, just content moderation to apease advertisers.
That makes so much more sense now why there's so much content that gets reported and stays online and you get responses that there's no violation despite it being clear violation...
I've reported so many tweets over the last couple of years, where people are threatening others with violence, posting graphic videos of animals being killed or videos from the Ukraine war full of overly graphic content and I just get replies that there is no violation and I just assume that it's an automated response unless many people report the same content.
Many social media systems experimented with a purely automated system and had difficulty with automated systems that likewise reported everything that they didn't like and that resulted in the content creators getting banned for non-reasons.
This leads to needing to having a human check things - and humans don't scale.
Look at the stories of Youtube content moderation - both the humans involved and the false positives from when humans aren't involved - for examples of "why we can't have nice things."
On Facebook, in comparison, you can delete nasty comments on a post by your brand. Brand safety is far more in your own hands there. I think this is true on LinkedIn too, although I’m not certain. In general it is a much “cleaner” place because of the focus on real names and career content.
This goes for most corporate discussion on HN where everyone talks with the authority of someone who deals with it daily. Unless you do have those insights, it's not all that interesting to regurgitate what we, the peanut gallery, suspect to be true.
I can reason for Kanye being dropped by the brands after saying unhinged things, as they directly engage with him but in the context of web advertisement what is the mechanics of unrelated content damaging the brand?
Brand teams at big companies, especially those in regulated industries, are incredibly risk averse. With Twitter typically being a small minority in a marketing mix, there’s a quickly diminishing benefit to sticking it out.
Add in a buggy ad platform that can steal your money? Lol nope.
The content is similar to right-wing Twitter, someone says how the Woke are letting Indians replacing the whites of America and the others reply to these with counter claims. Typical alt-right BS is everywhere and this is just one example from a recent popular topic.
The website is pretty much what Musk promised for free-speech: Anything legal goes. Of course a lot of anti-govt stuff is removed all the time because, Turkey. But stuff like this stays and all kind of brands have no problem advertising here. The website is alive and well since 1999 and the founder is very well known person who moved to California for good(probably was afraid from the Turkish govt, they were arresting media bosses all the time).
My point is, that brand safety stuff might not be absolute. I get your reasoning but that reasoning doesn't seem to apply everywhere and I wonder why Twitter wouldn't get an exception too.
What you're missing is that Twitter is not a top-tier advertising channel.
They are a very distant 3rd behind Facebook and Google and getting worse by the day. So it's not like advertisers are desperate to run ads on Twitter. In fact it has been the opposite. Twitter had to go out of their way to convince advertisers to come e.g. brand safety teams, account managers etc.
And now that those teams are gone the status quo is actually for advertisers to not run ads.
This isn't the case, not really. No one believes that Henry Ford has personally reviewed and approved every social media post that has an ad for Ford trucks next to it. That's just not how online advertisements work. (Consider that Gmail shows ads in your inbox, and that doesn't mean Ford is reading your mail.)
But activists and old-media and the like have managed to convince a lot of advertisers that it is the case. This happened relatively recently; the YouTube "ad-pocalypse" is less than ten years old. It'll be interesting to see how this perception changes in the future.
Because he died in 1947?
Advertisers are the ones with the power here. It is their money and there is a wide array of choices for them to spend that money. And they have made clear over many years that brand safety is important to them.
So if Twitter doesn't want to listen to them then they will suffer not the advertisers.
If it helps, the situation is similar to Donald Trump's presidency. The man had power, but he frequently made poor decisions based on his incorrect beliefs.
This seems like a serious concern.
Twitter advertisers never had control over the tweets that an ad appears between. That's pretty random. But the replies to promoted tweets are different matter, and they stick to the ad wherever it's seen.
It reflects their world view which is all that matters when they hold all the cards.
And not sure where you are getting the idea brand safety is a recent concept. According to this [1] aligning content and brand has been an issue for over 70 years.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/2021/05/19/...
Not sure if Henry Ford who was spreading antisemitic hoaxes is good example here.
(Incidentally, I just went to twitter to try to confirm my impression that they're always/nearly always interactive... It's no longer serving me ads. A couple of days ago it was at least showing me ads for online gambling and GPT-3-looking spam articles...)
They broke the deal." https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1595196519598080000
The condition he's referring to is the moderation council he had announced. Apparently they demanded a council, he agreed, announced it, and then they pressured advertisers anyway?
Also if they were actually activist, why would they be satisfied with just a moderation council? Surely if they cared about causes enough to agree to not criticize Twitter, they would criticize it for other things that would pop up?
This sounds like Elon didn’t bother setting up a council (there was never proof he tried) and is looking to spin the story now that advertisers are dropping off.
Remember that key advertisers dropped off before he even announced the idea of a council. They even specifically mentioned that his erratic behaviour was part of the reason.
I think Elon is going for the classic “victimhood” play to garner sympathy.
I think this thing is going to turn around in 3 months if it makes through these rocky waters. Whether the product is the same and we like it TBD
It's not like HN or sites like 4Chan require a lot to keep running but if Elon is hoping to get some return on his $44billion then that now seems very unrealistic (which based on his desperate and now-defunct 8$/month subscription scheme I assume he is)
The only way to fully replicate Twitter's ability for anyone to potentially address the entire world is to, well, replicate Twitter. No alternative (including, meta-speaking, Hacker News) suffices.
With the exception of the ideological concerns, all the problems described in the article can be eventually solved with restaffing.
I definitely hope that Twitter can find a better business model than advertising, which I think is fee for service. That has always been the best way, especially for social media. All the disinformation, the serotonin economy, the harassment, the impersonation–ALL the ills are reduced with a fee for service model.
It might work if Twitter didn't have a billion dollars in debt payments to make every year, on top of their fixed costs.
Totally agree. Would love for Twitter to be advertiser free. Will also put pressure on other social media apps.
How is this obvious? If you’ve ever been involved with someone leaving a team, you’ll understand there’s usually some chaos right after, as everyone catches up on absorbing some new responsibilities.
Now this, but spread throughout the company.
I think it’s too early to say that those who stayed are incapable of taking up the slack. Give them some time ffs. It’s only been two week.
Turns out people don't really want a Big Mac when it's sandwiched (ha ha) between Nazis and Crypto spam
They did 80M in aggregate, across channels. 750k/mo on Twitter is in the bounds of 8-10% of that total ad spend.