Twitter's top advertisers have left | Hacker News Reader

Twitter's top advertisers have left

cnn.com

63 pointsonion2k86 comments

Is it just twitter or in other places too?

Here in slovenia, the "real world" ad space (public ad displays, posters, jumbo posters,...), which was once full of ads for random commercial stuff (supermarkets, cars, fashion brands...) is now getting filled with ads for blood donations (nationalized healthcare, so not a private clinic), theatre and drama stuff (again, state financed) and even some leftover anti-firecracker 'ads' still left on since the time before the new year. There are still a lot of purely commercial ads, but the ratio is visibly shifting, as if companies are running out of marketing budgets, or don't want to advertise during the "depressive" months (people spent money for presents in december and are not spending so much now).

Could be anecdotal and just something happening locally though.

I was subscribed to TIME magazine around 2008, and it was astonishing to see whole issues with hardly any ads. I think it is as you said: When money is tight, it is comparatively easy to cut marketing spending for some time (easier than lay-offs, for example) and in addition to that, marketing might be less effective when people try to figure out how to cut their spending.

Most marketing experts agree that cutting spend during a downturn is one of the worst things you can do — typically space is going much cheaper than in the boom times, so it gives brands a chance to acquire mindshare / brand recall cheaply. On the other hand, for brands that do cut spend, the drop off is swift, and costs a lot to recover when the economy picks up again. Still, cutting in a downturn is not at all uncommon.

Not to be cynical, but of course they would say that, their livelihood depends on it.

Maybe they would, but it also has the benefit of being true — and backed by empirical research.

Let's see it then.

Who looks out a year ahead? Most people currently making the decisions in a role won’t be there in a year or two.

Advertising spend is likely down in general. The interesting thing here is that big brands are pulling out entirely. I can assure you that Coca Cola is still advertising, but they’re not doing it on twitter anymore.

Maybe Elon doesn't want to sell sugar water but rather change the world?

I’m not sure that ruining a second-tier social network counts as changing the world. Well, I suppose making the world marginally more irritating is a change of sorts.

How could that not be anecdotal and local in this context?

I mean seriously...I don't even know what you try to say here. The topic is some internet product living of ad money and they're losing it. How is your "real world" ad space in Slovenia even remotely related to what's happening at Twitter?

I was saying that (atleast here, what i've personally seen and assumed), companies seem to be reducing their spending budgets for ads in general, even the ones targeting offline people with offline ads (i use and adblock online, so I don't see the ads at all), so I was wondering if this is a trend that's happening on twitter too (generally much lower budgets for marketing, meaning less ads in general everywhere, including twitter), or if my assuption is wrong, companies are still spending the same huge amounts for ads, just not on twitter anymore.

Yeah, take a look at snap's performance over the last year. That's a very relevant similar product, and it's the same.

"But Elon's the devil and look how twitter is ruined" is a great headline for people who hate him, but it's not really accurate.

I don't think Elon is the devil (the devil is evil by necessity, and therefore lacks the agency required for blame).

The right comparison here is Twitter versus other social media companies: they've all probably taken a hit, but Twitter's hit appears to be worse. One then has to explain why that is.

Veering entirely off topic, but between the two fictional characters of god and Satan, god is far more evil: deaths attributable to god in the bible - 2,000,000+; deaths attributable to Satan in the bible - 10. And don’t forget all the women and children god sanctioned in to bondage. Satan was also apparently the talking snake that encouraged Eve to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, freeing humanity from the mental stupor god had endowed us with. Satan seems a rather decent fellow compared to god, and Elon seems much more like the petty, vindictive, thin-skinned god than the calculating Satan. But I digress.

Edit: spelling

This take is a relatively new and common one that arises from internalizing theology from ‘The Simpsons’, God is actually not considered a being in Christianity: https://thecatholicspirit.com/featured/father-barron-with-fa...

The root word for devil is ~~ the spirit of division. Ie human tendency to divide, form tribes, and kill each other.

It’s not all _that_ new; in particular the idea that Old Testament God is evil has been a recurrent form of Christian heresy basically since Christianity was invented (arguably _before_ it was invented; Marcionism was _really_ early). Often these heresies have the God who sent Jesus as a separate entity.

The idea that Satan is the good God is probably more recent, granted.

My understanding is that the Christian god is also omnifacient, meaning that he's also to blame for any deaths attributable to the devil (being the creator of the devil and all).

Edit: Except, of course, in the sense that the Christian god is also said to be omnibenevolent. It's left to the reader to determine how these qualities consistently combine.

Except Satan tempting Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden was the catalyst to introduce original sin and death into the world to begin with, so technically Satan's body count is the sum of all humanity. Except Enoch and Elijah and maybe Moses, for some reason.

I mean, the whole fable is a logical disaster. If you really believe the story then death is a great thing because you get eternal life in heaven; under the biblical schematic death is effectively irrelevant because you persist forever regardless. So eating of the tree was a good thing, really, because heaven is the best place ever and if you could not die you could not get to heaven. Therefore, Satan is really the first savior.

Well yes, the whole thing is ridiculous. I'm just saying that if your metric for good and evil is body count, the entity who basically tricked humans into dying to begin with still comes off worse.

Also (according to Christian doctrine,) the default destination for human souls is Hell, not Heaven, because original sin is immutable. The vast, vast majority of humanity will wind up burning in Hell for eternity, including many Christians.

Again, except for a few people God just decided to let in because he liked them.

But who created Satan, and the forbidden fruit? If Satan is responsible for the later consequences of his earlier actions, then surely we should apply the standard equally?

Yeah, the serpent always seemed to me reminiscent of Prometheus.

Old or New Testament?

> the devil is evil by necessity

That's the first time I read this one. Isn't the devil "fallen" in some way, or rejecting/splitting from heaven in most cultures?

There are different characterizations of the devil in different cultures and faith: a "fallen angel" is a common one, and "personification of evil" is another common one. My interpretation of the latter is that you can't really "personify" evil unless you're necessarily evil, which in turn precludes the possibility of any agency.

I see the "personification" as the addition of agency. In fact I would say the the exact point of personifying evil is so you can blame it. Turning around and saying you can't blame it because we personified it seems a bit backwards to me, as if what you are really objecting to is the personification in the first place.

In what sense can we blame the devil? Isn't that a bit like blaming rain for being wet?

Put another way: the defining aspect of the devil is evil; the devil can't not be evil, because to be the devil is to be evil. This is effectively a stripping of autonomy: if you can't not be something, there's no meaningful sense in which you can blamed for being that thing.

But that applies to everything you choose to define after what it does. By the same logic, I shouldn't deplore that gangs are engaging in violent activity, because we define a gang as a group that commits violent activities. A gang is violent by necessity, or it would be a regular group.

The point was about autonomy: you can argue about the necessary definition of a gang, but a gang is filled with human beings making decisions as rational agents. The devil, as characterized, is incapable of making the sorts of decisions that humans make (such as whether they should join a violent gang).

In other words: there's no contradiction in deploring a violent gang, because the actual object is a product of autonomous behavior; the gang could always cease to exist if its members chose to behave better. On the other hand, deploring the devil is a contradiction in terms: what else would the devil be but the devil?

Why couldn't the devil cease the be the devil, like a gang ('s members) can cease to be a gang? Of course he wouldn't be the devil anymore, but that's fine by me.

Just like the rain can stop. It doesn't stop being wet, the concept is not redefined, it just ceases being there.

My point is that you are adding that characterization onto the concept, it does not logically follow from our definition of the concept, "the devil is the personification of evil", that it is evil by necessity. It might be that it is a being incapable to stop (no way for me to disprove it, unless someone can meet him; you can certainly write the story that way, or you can write it another way, with fallen angels or a Santa Clause) but it is perfectly imaginable that it could. Of course, it would stop being the devil as to the common definition. But nothing in the definition of the concept says that it doesn't have the agency to stop.

I always find articles like these odd. CNN states a "fact"(1), then states a bunch of other "facts" with the obvious implication that this is the reason for 1. Yet in no where in the article did the affected parties go on record to corroborate this. Nevertheless they have successfully gotten the message out there that Twitter is in trouble under Elon.

>Yet in no where in the article did the affected parties go on record to corroborate this.

Not excusing the article, but it feels very rare that we get someone "on the record" or an objective "this is actually happening due to the information we have" out of journalism. It's opinion and supposition disguised as fact.

Obviously it's because of NDAs, punishments for going on-record and personal safety, but it still feels like that shouldn't be an excuse for shoddy articles.

That’s quite a huge leap from “here’s a bunch of facts the seem to point to a specific conclusion” to “it’s all shoddy journalism and nothing but opinions”. This article lays out a number of facts, which quite clearly connects the dots to a clear picture of what’s going on.

Even in science we mostly have a “bunch of facts that probably point to a specific conclusion” and that’s usually the best we can get.

> quite clearly connects the dots to a clear picture

Thats the opinion part

It's the general circular reasoning of mainstream media. A lot of the stories produced by organizations like CNN boil down to rumor, tweets, and personal beliefs, that are then amplified as "facts".

Each fact in this article references back to itself. When you strip everything away, the only question is, do you trust CNN as a source of factual news?

For a lot of Americans that is a resounding NO.

The better sources in this comment gave useful details:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34752652

You find articles that aren’t lightly-rewritten press releases from involved parties “odd”?

I suppose that's accurate, but...

Well this has been basically CNN's whole "journalism" model for years. I'm old enough to remember how "Trump has small hands and I don't like him anyway" was basically given as the reason for all evils under the sun.

https://twitter.com/LouPas/status/1588599808587345921

Why would any advertiser want to go to Twitter, when the owner publicly threatens anyone who dares to stop advertising in his playhouse?

For context, Lou Paskalis ran Bank of America’s marketing when it spent more on ads than all influencers make nowadays.

> HBO, for example, was Twitter’s top advertiser in September, spending nearly $12 million on ads that month, but for the month of January (as of January 25), it spent just over $54,000.

I wonder how that business case for HBO looked like that it was worth 12M per month?

And if was, then cutting it back to 54k does not make sense.

Seems to me like a case of "We need those ads"-spend that rose over time, and nobody cared to look into to evaluate it again.

Those are the figures for Twitter, so maybe HBO just reallocated those $12M on Facebook/Google/billboards instead.

Regardless of whether the ad spend was bearing fruit, Zaslav’s Warner-Discovery is big on austerity. For HBO in particular, that could be a (potentially bigger) factor over Twitter becoming an unpalatable platform… although I’m sure recent changes to Twitter don’t help.

I see HBO ads for their two most buzzed about series on Snap daily

There’s the old saying with advertising. Maybe HBO decided to spend that $12m on the other half.

It's time for MLM schemes and woo supplements to fully move in. Also, Anya Taylor-Joy verified account has pushed laptops recently. I doubt that she is really in need of that. Also, Elon can make a mint on political advertising in the coming cycle.

It’s not the first or last time someone will say this, but I continue to be fascinated by the sheer scale of Twitter’s self-ablation: I’m not aware of any other company or company leadership that has worked so directly to erode its market position and latent value in so little time.

Generations of insufferable MBAs will no doubt study Twitter’s acquisition looking for the method in the madness.

Reminds me of Target's Canada launch. It's literally a case study in business textbooks of how to do everything wrong.

I said it before and I'll say it again: If Musk's goal was to destroy Twitter from the inside, he seems to be succeeding. What fascinates me the most is that all of this was worth so much money to him.

He tried to back out of the deal, but his hand was forced. , wasn’t it?

He basically bought it by accident. Maybe he thought he could really do something to improve and then sell for a profit.

But really… it’s like the alcoholic who buys the distillery.

My totally wild idea here is that he's trying to glitch the banking system by incurring the largest possible personal loss (though it's all levered) in history so that he never has to pay taxes for any of his space adventures in the future

To be clear I don't fall into the "5D Chess Genius Elon Musk" trope

However he's smart and a sociopath who has shown expertise in financial engineering using any sources he can with no regard to the fallout so long as it pushes the "Musk as space leader" narrative

Musk doesn't have to pay taxes on his stock unless and until he sells it, which ironically is what he has been forced to do in order to finance the Twitter deal. So if he wanted to avoid paying taxes, purchasing Twitter was the dumbest idea ever. But I seriously doubt that was his reason.

Money aside, Musk seems to genuinely enjoy using Twitter, and all the attention he gets from it, so it would be personally self-destructive for him to destroy the company in some kind of convoluted tax avoidance scheme. If he wanted to lose money, he could do it with a company he doesn't care about.

Losing $X money in order to not pay taxes on up to $X income, where you could've just not lost $X in the first place, isn't exactly financial engineering.

Sounds like a great opportunity to buy high value ads then at a huge discount.

Advertisers haven't left for political reasons. They've left because the value of ads on Twitter aren't worth the cost they're being asked to pay.

The only thing you can trust large publicly traded companies to do is the thing they believe will make them the most money.

The problem is the ads aren't high value anymore.

Assuming, of course, that the pricing model for ads is correct[1]! This can be read either as an opportune purchasing moment, as "chickens coming to roost" for Twitter's own mismanagement, a broad advertising market correction, or all three.

[1]: https://www.fsgoriginals.com/books/subprime-attention-crisis

The thing is that you’d be selling to a certain crowd that’s now left at Twitter, that’s not entirely desirable ad-wise.

Were Twitter's ads ever that valuable?

I always figured that social media advertising was closer to trying to advertise to people who already put all their time into that social media(kinda close to an addict), meaning there's only a small subset of services that are actually sell-able to such a person.

Here’s the thing — even if the advertisers leaving twitter isn’t Elon’s fault (I think it is). The threat to the company that it poses is. He chose to buy it with leverage in an inflationary economy, and he now has to deal of the billion to two billion in interest that the company has to pay annually. The company simply doesn’t have the cushion to survive a single downturn unless Elon decides to drain his wealth to keep this project alive.

If Musk can get Twitter running without being subjected to advertisers goals and wishes then it would be a massive win imo

….all the revenue was ads and Musk has not found a replacement. Twitter Blue was minuscule.

They’re not even really trying to replace ads. For example, they just shut down all third party twitter apps. They could have instead said “to use a third party app you need twitter blue”

But they nuked the space instead, principally because their api has no way to display ads in these apps.

By not paying rent and putting beds in the office? No reason to defend this clear insanity.

If users have to pay per tweet and the platform is down every few days I'm not sure who'd be winning.

Did other similar companies experience equivalent decline during this period?

Did those top advertisers reduce their spending elsewhere as well?

How many of them have publicly stated their reasons?

How much of the total ad revenue comes from the top 1000 advertisers?

Once we get answers to those questions, we can start making conclusions about the causes and the impact beyond simple speculation.

I think that’s the real evolving story here. It’s no mystery why advertisers don’t want their ads next to posts by a human trafficker. Twitter still has good value for political ads, though, and I believe will run some high-profile sales.

Please remind me: Why have these companies stopped buying ads on Twitter?

My exact question.

Surely, Coca-Cola did not cancel Musk because of woke.

The article only suggests one possible cause, being risk of ads being associated with controversial content, since Musk has relaxed moderation.

I am tempted to believe it's a self-reinforcing effect: Because there was an exodus, the platform becomes less attractive to advertise on, which makes the platform less attractive to advertise on.

Maybe another contributing cause was the whole blue checkmark controversy where a bunch of people copied known brands, paid a few bucks for a blue icon, and subsequently trolled the internet as if a blue checkmark on twitter means you really are that company.

Big clients use a mix of long-term commitments and short-term spending, they advertise in several channels, they evaluate continuously (every minute or even more often), and they mix long-term purchases with short-term.

If someone spends $10m/month in total and $2m/month on Twitter, that company might buy $1m/month in long-term discounted advertising and the rest at short-term prices (these are numbers I dreamed up).

If Twitter's content or targeting becomes a little worse, Twitter loses the marginal advertising auctions, which can lead to zero short-term spending, because the long-term volume covers all that the client's code decides to spend there. (In other news, Facebook ad volumes increased recently.)

Probably brand safety

Sure, but why, specifically?

I would not be surprised if they have metrics showing brand safety going down as content moderators got laid off. Disney doesn't want to visit the top page of reddit and see a screenshot of their Twitter ads running next to a video of Kanye and Alex Jones

The standard answer is that e.g. Coca Cola doesn't want their ad to appear on the same screen as some random Neo Nazi tweet that apparently are getting through in the Musk era of Twitter.

"apparently"

Extremist influencers are generating millions for Twitter https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34738473

View counts on Twitter aren’t accurate https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34748435

Most Experts Agree That Elon Has Made Twitter’s Child Sexual Abuse Problem Worse https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34750659

It doesn't matter, musk has a much more reliable and lucrative business plan, $8 for a blue tick, less need for ads.

…the numbers are out on Twitter blue sub revenue. It’s missing at least one zero to be replacing the monthly ad money. Probably 2.

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