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Comment by jsheard | Hacker News Reader

On the other hand Musks Twitter is demonstrating that there are limits to "any engagement is good engagement", with their advertising business in shambles since the big agencies have deemed them a brand risk. Engagement isn't worth much if only the absolute dregs of advertisers want to appear on your site.

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Thats really more of a sign of oligopoly limiting competition among brands and/or collusion among oligopolists. If the market for the goods and services being advertised was actually competitive nobody would risk that for more than a very short time, as the first company to ignore it would have an advantage. They may create a new brand selling essentially the same product and advertise that on edgier engagemwnt sites but they wouldnt do what they have done if the market was actually competitive.

there is certainly no oligopoly over ALL products and services that can be advertised for. that's just nonsense talking points from musk, who is trying to excuse the toxic mess he has made of Twitter.

There certainly is a large market concentration in advertising and it is naive to claim otherwise. All is irrelevant. What matters for oligopoly is enough to exercise market power, which is pretty clearly what is happening here because the competitive incentive is to find a way to advertise on x because its a huge market that is underserved right now.

So you're saying what's "pretty clearly happening" is there's no way the "competitive incentive" is ignored in this "large under-served market" for any other reason than the specific "market power" interference caused by an advertising oligopoly? Do you then also think Musk purchased one of the largest advertising driven platforms on the planet without understanding this "pretty clear" outcome could happen from any controversial action? :)

It is irrelevant what musk thought it is only relevant what is happening. What is happening is large companies can afford to ignore a market because a group of them have colluded and know the others wont break the agreement to boycott and the produxt options are so heavily weighted to their group that the consumers will be consuming their produxt anyway.

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