Bad news has become a constant in the offices of Twitter during the last months, more specifically since the arrival of Elon Musk to the direction of the social network. We cannot, to be honest, blame the billionaire for all the ills that afflict Twitter since, for example, his accounts were already really disastrous with the previous management team. However, it is also indisputable that his rather peculiar style of management and communication has had and is having truly worrying effects.
Neither freedom of expression nor anything, his management has made it clear, from the first minute, that the only thing that really worries him is profitability. Be careful, this is understandable, since he has made a huge investment to gain control of Twitter and, as we already warned here at the beginning of the whole soap opera of the purchase, the effects of said operation were not going to go unnoticed in Musk’s accounts. , which in a few months from that moment would have to start paying installments and interest on the loans and credits obtained to finance the purchase.
Thus, we have seen how it has focused on Twitter Blue, with the intention of growing the number of subscribers of this payment method, has closed free access to the Twitter API, which can have very negative effects for researchers , it has laid off more than half of the workforce, it has even stopped paying the rent for its offices, it has auctioned objects from them… it is hard to imagine what else it could try to do to improve income.
The problem, of course, is that some of these measures, such as stopping paying rent and auctioning off office furniture or, of course, dispensing with a large part of the moderation teams, which for years have worked to keep the social network as free as possible of hate content and the like, These are things that advertisers don’t like.which form an essential part of the accounts of the social network.
Thus, a few weeks ago we already had the first news about the effect of Elon Musk’s policies on Twitter advertisers and, as we told you then, the data was not good at all. And now, as we can read in Gizchina, things seem to be getting worse, since Twitter would have lost about 65% of the top 1,000 advertisers September 2022. Specifically, of the thousand brands and companies that used the advertising services of the social network at that time, 625 no longer do so today.
But the situation is even worse, since some of the companies that do remain have substantially reduced their investment in advertising, something that we can not only blame on Twitter’s policies, of course, but on what they have also been able to influence. For example, the article mentions that in September HBO Max’s investment in advertising through the social network was $12 million, but that in January it was reduced to $54,000.
