I told my team to pause our $750K/month Twitter ads budget last week
teamblind.com
teamblind.com
If a bunch of ad-buyers quit the marketplace, then prices will go down, and the ones who didn't quit will get a better return on their investment.
Unsurprising, as the experience is being degraded. I now get far more spam, see more hateful and unmoderated responses to certain people, and the glitches are increasing. I now open the app less often too.
Maybe that'll reverse, it's too early to say. But it's also wrong to dismiss this as flippantly as you have.
So it's largely pointless to hand-wring about what has been lost for users and advertisers in the past few weeks, as it wasn't working anyway. A dramatic change had to come someday, somehow; whether it be the company going insolvent and being acquired or someone coming in to attempt a dramatic turnaround.
So the latter has happened, and Elon is determined to make it much better for users and advertisers over the long term. Will he succeed? Nobody knows! But the drama of the past few weeks is not any indication either way; it's just inevitable upheaval when a turnaround effort begins.
Nor was there an urgent need for Twitter to have as dramatic a change as you say, as the company had healthy enough revenue and profit growth over the past five years and decent levels of cash on hand.
What we're seeing now is far more severe and consequential than the normal upheaval in a turnaround effort, and it's far beyond anything that the company was contemplating in terms of its own restructuring and refocusing efforts. I also question the claim that Musk is determined to make it 'much better' for users and advertisers, at least in a sense that most users and advertisers would agree with rather than Musk's own flawed views of what matters.
More broadly, the company has been a disappointment from what investors would have hoped for when it listed in 2013, and has been stagnant at best in recent years with no signs of having any idea of how to reinvigorate itself. Yes it may have had cash in the bank and stable usage and advertising revenue, but a company in its position needs to have a clear mission and path of improvement and growth, which it has not had for a long time, if ever since its first few years, really. That cash would start running out with the losses it's been recording lately, and in an increasingly hostile marketplace, raising new funds would have become difficult without solid signs of a bright future.
We can all have our opinions about the merits of what Musk is doing now, but it's all just conjecture and holds little weight until things have played out over a few months and years.
For what it's worth, I'm not any kind of Musk devotee (see other recent comments of mine for more about this); I'm just interested to see how it plays out, and skeptical of people claiming to make long-term predictions based on short-term drama and emotive reporting of it by people who know nothing about building companies.
I did not really make a difference for Facebook, and I guess the same will happened for Twitter. If the technical platform fails that is something else.
"Our organic social and CS teams got dozens of screenshots of our ads next to awful content. Replies to our posts with hardcore antisemitism and adult spam remained up for days even when flagged."
It is interesting to see the level of entitlement advertisers have on quasi-public SM platforms.
Edit: What's one good reason to have hate speech on your platform?
Edit: To answer your added question. In an ideal world there is no good reason to allow hate speech on SM platforms.
But free speech does not equate to hate speech. And there is no legal distinction for the term (hate speech) as far as US law is concerned [0]. The term however can be defined and in different ways according to many other countries' laws.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...
My main issue with the article is different however, and has everything to do with this advertiser's misplaced demands on the outcome of social media engagement they expect to receive back from SM users and trying to use the native advertising model as an excuse to try and interfere with the platform's content. The concerns they have about brand safety seem to arise from the fact that they are now not able to request for content that does not align with their selfish interests to be taken down.
Elon has been clear from the get go that he's pro free speech (he has also previously said that he didn't acquire Twitter purely to make a profit) and that he is not going to go beyond what is permissible by law in moderating the platform. The advertiser in question should therefore adjust their advertising campaigns accordingly.
Not really. He's mouthed the words, of course, but it appears that his definition of "free speech" is "whatever Musk wants it to be".
> he is not going to go beyond what is permissible by law in moderating the platform
Not what he said. What he said is that he'll allow allow all speech that isn't illegal. He could decide to censor all speech from everyone on Twitter right now, and that wouldn't go beyond what is permissible by law.
> The advertiser in question should therefore adjust their advertising campaigns accordingly.
Why? Advertisers don't have freedom of speech? They should be forced to engage in speech and do business with a company when they find it distasteful or potentially harmful to their business?
Pretty hard to nail this perfectly if we are being honest. But Twitter allows more free speech now than before.
> Not what he said. What he said is that he'll allow allow all speech that isn't illegal. He could decide to censor all speech from everyone on Twitter right now, and that wouldn't go beyond what is permissible by law.
Not sure I understand your argument here.
> Why? Advertisers don't have freedom of speech? They should be forced to engage in speech and do business with a company when they find it distasteful or potentially harmful to their business?
Advertisers have freedom of speech. What they don't have now is the ability to coerce the Twitter platform into censoring other users' speech. Besides they are free to do business where their needs are best served. Twitter's not a monopoly.