X May Lose Up to $75M in Revenue as More Advertisers Pull Out | Hacker News Reader

X May Lose Up to $75M in Revenue as More Advertisers Pull Out

nytimes.com

77 pointsdoener86 comments

Mark Cuban made a great point:

> If advertisers were getting results from their X ads, or possibly If you posted data that showed that ads on this platform were effective and produced results, you would be in an entirely different position.

> If your ads produce results, businesses would tell you they understand how difficult it is to completely eliminate hate on the platform.

> If they don't produce results, there is no reason for a big company to fuck around and find out that their ads showed up next to a hateful post.

> I can't tell you how many times I get Cheech ,(or is it Chong?) ads for CBD gummies. Shit I would never buy. ..

> On other platforms ads sometimes are eerily relevant to my interests.

> That never occurs on this platform

When asked if he ever advertised on X:

> Multiple of my portfolio companies have. And I always ask them to check. Without exception, all have said it doesn't give the same returns as other platforms

https://x.com/mcuban/status/1727400271364669756

There's no/minimal targeting by X. Or at least weren't before Musk. It was all advertisers bidding. The granularity was good, but you still needed to figure out the audience and how much to bid yourself.

With large advertisers fleeing, you now get shit because it's cheap for third rate advertisers to bid peanuts for broad audiences their products aren't very relevant for.

It doesn't have to be "next to" a hate filled post. Also, it wasn't just ads next to racist/misogynist/etc. posts, it was Elon saying a racist and antisemitic post was "the truth." It was the owner of the whole platform saying that. Good targeting can't fix that.

It's already in an unrecoverable death spiral, not from a money sense but from a brand and management sense.

Without functional moderation and a trustworthy brand there is nothing to keep it afloat.

I'm curious: are there any advertisers that actually thrive in a situation like this?

I.e., where the lack of reputability is actually a benefit for their business / advertising goals?

Look at the ads there now. Lots of bargain basement advertisers who probably don't gain from being associated with X but aren't hurt by it either, and who gain indirectly when quality advertisers fleeing because the bids on placements have gone through the floor.

Gold. Survival food buckets. Whatever else you need to equip a bunker.

http://archive.today/pojZq

No clue what archive.today is but it won't let me pass a captcha

https://web.archive.org/web/20231124231504/https://www.nytim...

same. hasn't worked in about 2 months.

Cloudflare DNS and archive.* have a disagreement.

Connect to a VPN & try different browsers until you can get past the captcha in one of them. If I can't get past it in 2 tries, I switch to a different VPN server.

iCloud private relay breaks it. “Show IP address” in safari generally fixes it

It's a fake CAPTCHA. No matter how many times you pass it'll make you try again. It's tarpitting you because you're using some technology to increase your privacy, such as iCloud Private Relay or Cloudflare's DoH, and the operator of archive.today is opposed to privacy.

*reposting workaround:

CloudFlare is in the right. This is for privacy. No location info sent.

Just put the IPs on your hosts file, it's easy. https://dns.google/query?name=archive.today

41.77.143.21 archive.today

41.77.143.21 archive.is

41.77.143.21 archive.ph

While there try a hosts blocklist

http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33937866

I’m so happy that I’m not on any social media beside this and LinkedIn.

I feel bad for people who choose to waddle through ads.

I feel bad for people who have to be on LinkedIn. Is this for a job?

LinkedIn just to see what companies are working on or doing, what jobs are out there, etc. I don't really follow people/posts, just do my own searches.

LinkedIn is something you keep only to be seen by recruiters.

I don't really interact with anything there, but I keep an up-to-date profile and sometimes post some technical articles or tutorials. I put the some effort on those, but I don't care if anyone reads it. The purpose there is just to have some well-written technical articles under my name.

Anyone know if it's possible to buy 'scrap slots' of ads on X or any other social or internet media?

There are some things that would be willing to get into X ads or even tumbler or similar in areas that mainstream ad cos might deem brand unsafe..

I am guessing these ad slots could be bought at 1/10th the regular cost and even give some options like demographics, over 18, certain cities, etc.

Make the slots available with a disclaimer your ad may appear by anti-this and anti-that and cancelled / hate / porn - check box to continue..

I suppose it could start to auction and raise price one day - but for now just put ads in a line.

asking for a friend.

That’s like the point of their whole ad platform. Because there aren’t great bids for inventory, it’s why you see so much temu/wish/marijuana ads.

https://business.twitter.com/en/help/troubleshooting/bidding...

You just described what ad companies have been doing since the early 2000s...

The whole of Twitter seems to be scraps ads now. It’s all mobile game ads and ads for shitty Ali express junk.

Just bid low. X ads work by bids on an audience. Audiences with low bids are extremely cheap.

E.g. reasonably targeted US audiences used to cost $1.50 or more per follow (I don't remember click rates), while random bottom of the barrel follows could be obtained for <4c (you'd end up with non-English speakers in third world countries with little on their profile)

That said, even "quality" audiences on Twitter are really and miss depending on what you try to achieve.

Freedom of association is also in the First Amendment.

> X May Lose Up to $75M

If that goes on for only 3,213 more years, Musk is going to be in real trouble.

I'm seeing ads for all their competitors and it's kinda interesting to watch it play out

"This xmas I'm buying subscriptions to X for the whole family."

There is a whole parallel economy popping up due to all these cancellations. Rumble is even creating a parallel aws for these startups to run on. (Rumble cloud)

I wonder what the parallel of visa/matercard/discover and consequently (paypal and stripe) would be because these services/cards are going to be the root of the parallel economy.

I suspect they'll rapidly discover why major payment processors aren't into that "economy" and the reasons rhyme with "Fraud and Chargebacks."

Having said that, knocking antisocial people off the mainstream and back into a digital hole seems like a win to me.

You sound pretty antisocial. Be careful what you wish for, you might find yourself at the wrong end of the stick.

> major payment processors aren't into that "economy" and the reasons rhyme with "Fraud and Chargebacks."

I feel like this is the lemon problem, where that group of people are mainly lemons. As more normal people move over, i feel like it will be more Signal (chat app) and less Mastodon/Keybase/Tor.

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