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Comment by 627467 | Hacker News Reader

I don't know how this ongoing "Twitter revolution" is going to turn out (out of pessimism, I bet the likelyhood of success is 3:7) but it does seem that musk et al. at least diagnosed correctly when saying that Twitter needs to find new revenue sources (other than ads) - NOT because there's anything inherently bad with ad money (there is!) - but because it is now clear that advertisers were not sticky on Twitter ad platform since they are so ready to jump ship en mass within weeks.

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.

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> advertisers were not sticky on Twitter ad platform since they are so ready to jump ship en mass within weeks.

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.

> but because it is now clear that advertisers were not sticky on Twitter ad platform since they are so ready to jump ship en mass within weeks.

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).

> 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 :(

Watch him turn it into an OnlyFans clone... seems like the only viable subscription model to earn enough to stay afloat, porn. If he implemented AI Porn features, could earn more. With patrion/substack style subscription features for the non-porn content too, maybe it works?

Twitter already made that. They launched Subscriptions (previously Super Follows) a year ago.

https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/product/2021/introduci... https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/subscriptions

but adult content can’t be monetized right now afaik

Twitter would need a lot of subscriptions to justify a $44B valuation on user revenue alone. You'd need 16 million subscribers paying $8/mo each just to cover operating expenses. Maybe Elon can bring opex down (firing everyone is a start, I guess?); maybe it is just a vanity purchase after all, but there is a reason that the advertising model is so dominant in social media, and so hard to avoid. Reddit has done everything it can to grow direct user revenue for years now and it's still basically an ad company.

If there are eyeballs, there will be ads. Right now, he cares about keeping the eyeballs and he's definitely doing that.

I barely used Twitter over the past 10ish years and I'm spending more time on it than ever right now.

Those people are just one news cycle away from not caring anymore.

True but reality is more nuanced than that. Case in point, Truth Social also "has eyeballs" but is there any respectable company investing in ads there?

For better or worse, the type of eyeballs also matter, increasingly so I'd say.

Believing that Twitter's ad revenue is unsustainable is a reason to short Twitter, not a reason to pay a huge premium to acquire it.

Well to be fair, if you think you can give Twitter a better revenue source that eventually captures more value for Twitter, you can think a long play makes sense here.

> but it does seem that musk et al. at least diagnosed correctly when saying that Twitter needs to find new revenue sources (other than ads)

You dont do this by first discarding all your existing revenue sources.

I don't think most ads are critical to specific platforms, especially if those platforms take a sudden turn of ownership. I'm sure if Facebook got bought out, somehow, and the new ownership started telling all of their ad clients that they have literally no plan for them, they would also leave in droves. [My understanding is that this is what Musk effectively did during an end-of-year reestablishment of annual advertising contracts, thereby Twitter got a lot of clients leaving the platform.]

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