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Comment by jsnell | Hacker News Reader

This is just a second hand rehash of an anonymous and unverifiable comment on Blind. If there's a real adverising exodus, there must be better sources than that.

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> More than a third of Twitter’s top 100 clients have not advertised on the platform in the past two weeks, data shows

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/11/22/twitter...

That means little for the long term. What happens, is many companies do such things to "make a story of it" to appease some advertising base, and then quietly when no on is looking, or cares, in a few months companies quietly re-allocate budget back to such media channels.

Yeah, but isn’t the issue a long term problem now? If he is committed to little/no moderation, when would things change in a direction that would bring advertisers back?

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.

This theory is that rather than the change itself driving advertises away, it's outrage about the change that's driving them away. In which case they could be expected to only stay away for as long as the outrage persists.

I’m saying as long as brands can’t be guaranteed their ads won’t regularly show up next to horrific things, they won’t come back. Especially since they weren’t great To be fun with, having significantly smaller numbers of advertisers than their competitors.

Brands don't care at all what's next to their advertising. It is much more important for them to be on the right side of the conflict.

If Musk is upset over losing $4M/day, then losing 1/4 the revenue stream for 3 months should be significant. He cut HC to help pay for the interest on the purchase loan, cut revenue for 3+ months. In the process, he fired the very people who might be able to coax advertisers to return.

That sounds to me like a flywheel of failure or a death spiral, self-inflicted.

Incidentally, I’ve been seeing more ads than ever before on Twitter. There’s a promoted tweet every four tweets in my timeline. I’m pretty sure this is more than it was previously. It’s annoying!

Are you not using an adblocker?

I am not not using one. On iOS Safari, with both firefox focus and wipr blocking content, the “promoted tweets” are not blocked. But the ads on every other site are.

Advertisers could just be pausing till the dust settles - which it eventually will. The faltering economy also is a good reason for advertisers to take this opportunity to revisit their ad spend. This could just be temporary, the next couple months will be telling. Until then it is premature to call advertising on Twitter dead

What is the distribution of this statistic in normal times? I don't know if a third is low or high.

I’ve noticed more ads lately than prior to Elon being involved.

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.

Both those things can be true. If many of the top advertisers pulled their ads then they could be going out to the long tail and showing a larger number of lower value ads to compensate.

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.

It’s anonymous as execs compared to Twitter who will never admit to these issues. It also tracks with what little I know about advertising.

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.

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