Twitter’s U.S. Ad Sales Plunge 59% as Woes Continue
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Almost no one gets their news from Fox News, or cable news in general. People who do are less informed.
They had a business that (in theory) appealed to every human on the planet. Now they don't. It's shedding its userbase as a result.
Not to mention the Venn diagram between "people who are not already on Twitter and are evaluating Twitter as a platform to use" and "Fox News / right wing information consumers" has a very narrow overlap.
140 IQ move
In fact I'm at a stage in my life where the idea of social media participation just isn't appealing any more.
(Also, Hughes largely stayed out of direct running of his important businesses when he was in his pea-sizing phase, as far as I know)
2016 can't be repeated, people have learnt that hard way
Revenue could shrink further and none of that would be lost. Growing revenue could let them improve things I don't care about (spaces, video, payments, etc). I guess yay for them if they improve revenue, yawn if they don't.
> advertising revenue for the five weeks from April 1 to the first week of May was $88 million
For example: Southwest airlines has a huge number of advertisements across the internet. But Southwest doesn't want these advertisements to appear next to airport disasters. This kind of "custom request" is the bulk of $Millions+ revenues. You need to constantly cater to these company's seemingly arbitrary requests as they try to protect their brand.
Twitter fired the team that did this. And when they did, the big companies that care about their image left.
That never seems to matter when big services shut down. It's more about VC-level opportunity cost ("will this give me unicorn-level returns?")
$88mm per month is ~$1bn per year. That yields a low single-digit enterprise value on a generous revenue multiple, which implies—as do Twitter’s bond prices—that the equity is already worthless. (Twitter Blue is revenue irrelevant [1].)
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/24/twitter-blue-subscriptions...
Equity being worthless means imminent bankruptcy. That means, at a minimum, operational disruptions, challenges over control and possibly the end of Twitter as an independent concern.
It's like the feed is becoming an addiction machine, just like youtube has already done before Tiktok perfected this "you can't control shit, just watch endless streams of our garbage."
How so? If Twitter goes under due to debts and lack of revenue, all of that will disappear.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/judge-calls-blocks-purchas...
Even in profitable years (year??) the profit per employee was woeful.
brb, drafting a valuation of my economic activity at randint(10^9)