Twitter’s U.S. Ad Sales Plunge 59% as Woes Continue(nytimes.com)
nytimes.com
Twitter’s U.S. Ad Sales Plunge 59% as Woes Continue
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/05/technology/twitter-ad-sales-musk.html
92 comments
> Revenue could shrink further and none of that would be lost.
How so? If Twitter goes under due to debts and lack of revenue, all of that will disappear.
How so? If Twitter goes under due to debts and lack of revenue, all of that will disappear.
Have they tried to reduce their ad prices by 59% ?
Given that 2/3rds of the employees are now gone, doesn’t this mean that the business is still viable?
I think Elon owes ~120M/mo. just in debt servicing, let alone costs of doing business. So, 88M/mo. is just not going to cut it.
Why not just fire everyone, and Elon can run it on 1% of its original revenue?
brb, drafting a valuation of my economic activity at randint(10^9)
brb, drafting a valuation of my economic activity at randint(10^9)
I'd struggle to name a period where this company has ever been viable.
Even in profitable years (year??) the profit per employee was woeful.
Even in profitable years (year??) the profit per employee was woeful.
It may have been if he hadn't saddled the company with massive debt
Paywall, not gonna read it.
When the Bluesky and the Facebook competitors launch I can see a lot of big firms moving across to those and leaving Twitter behind. Twitter is going to become the Fox news of social media I think. Lots of hardcore maga, funded by ads from the same people that advertise on Fox News.
I don't know. With Jack confidently predicting a conspiracy theorist will win the presidency, it tells me Bluesky isn't going to be my destination.
In fact I'm at a stage in my life where the idea of social media participation just isn't appealing any more.
In fact I'm at a stage in my life where the idea of social media participation just isn't appealing any more.
Maybe, but Dorsey's political opinions didn't influence Twitter's operations that much, at least compared to current owner's ones.
This is the key. People and companies aren't fleeing Twitter because of what Musk believes, they're fleeing because of what he does.
People sometimes compare Musk to Howard Hughes. This is unfair, on Hughes; as far as I know, if you bought a plane from him he rarely showed up at your house to insist that you not eat large peas. Musk, by contrast, tends to inflict his neuroses on his user base.
(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)
(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)
Not only predicting the presidency, but explicitly providing endorsement for them!
Delusions of grandeur when tech executives have begun to believe, and pursue that their followers develop them a cult of personality and subvert the Democratic process.
What candidate is Dorsey endorsing and what conspiracies does this candidate believe in?
RFK Jr, presumably because he likes bitcoin.
What is the conspiracy theory?
RFK Jr doesn't believe in any vaccine, often citing the debunked paper that links autism with vaccines. Yea not even vaccines for polio, mmr etc.
I tried to search for it, but can only find results about what a terrible human he is. I gave up trying to find his own words.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been anti-vaxx for many years. When COVID started he went full in on the "5G Bill Gates microchips!!!" stuff and the craziest of the craziest of COVID-related nonsense.
Robert F Kennedy Jr. He's an anti-vaxxer and HIV/AIDS denier.
It’s the Yahoo comment section at this point, especially for blue checks. No one who can post would pay 8 dollars a month, so it’s all hustlebro scammers or idiotic conspiracy theories.
One of the most brilliant ideas: Put the content of people who need to pay for engagement, whether due to their own psychoses or due to the fact they produce garbage content, above anyone who organically produces engaging content.
140 IQ move
140 IQ move
I think that is far from guaranteed. Most people aren't reading twitter to see what Fox news, or any other media company, thinks the news should be about.
I think you're rather missing the point the parent was making. It doesn't matter what you're there for, if the experience feels Fox-News-like, a lot of people will leave. The people remaining will be those who like Fox News.
Fox news is the biggest news organization in the US by viewership, which seems to be a positive shift then? This does not reflect in the numbers
Another way to look at it is that it's the lowest common denominator. It's 'news' in the same way that McDonalds is technically a restaurant.
The highest rated cable news program is still a drop in the bucket. It's just not that many people. It's up there with large niche YouTube channels: popular in their space like a Linus Tech Tips or Contrapoints, but most people have never heard of them. More people watch Stephen Colbert poke fun at Fox News than watch Fox News.
Almost no one gets their news from Fox News, or cable news in general. People who do are less informed.
Almost no one gets their news from Fox News, or cable news in general. People who do are less informed.
Yes. But mainstream advertisers stay away from many of the talk shows on Fox News.
No, it's a negative shift. Twitter trying to be a Fox News is reducing their total addressable market and value, you understand that, right?
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.
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.
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"in the US" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. The entire rest of the world thinks Fox News is grotesque. Twitter becoming something that's a laughing stock to most of the planet is probably not "positive".
_ea1k(3)
hker999(3)
I use Twitter to keep up on AI and the new space industry (there really is no alternative).
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.
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.
> Revenue could shrink further and none of that would be lost
$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...
$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...
Right, and that would matter if we owned equity, but we don't, so?
> that would matter if we owned equity, but we don't, so?
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.
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.
That's not how private companies work, and that's not how bankruptcy works either
What a shortsighted view!
Do you think Twitter operates out of the goodness of their hearts and will continue to let you keep up on Ai and new space in the face of losing money? Do you think what’s there will just do to help working without active maintenance? Do you think the servers that make all this possible are running for free?
Their revenue is massively larger than the cost to run their servers (I used to run 3000 physical servers with a small team, it doesn't cost much)
> advertising revenue for the five weeks from April 1 to the first week of May was $88 million
> advertising revenue for the five weeks from April 1 to the first week of May was $88 million
Servers may be cheap to run, but the interest bill on ~20bn of loans is expensive.
> Their revenue is massively larger than the cost to run their servers
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?")
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?")
You’re off by a couple
orders of magnitude on what it takes to run Twitter.
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Ad revenue is mostly tied to sales people talking with big companies, addressing their issues.
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.
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.
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Lol no twitter def doesn’t run out of goodness but if Elon wants to keep the view count high, he’s going to continue to allow any sort of engagement
I still blame Jack Dorsey. He seriously has very little to show for what he did at Twitter for a decade.
He created a business, with about $13B in funding, which the richest guy on the planet (at the time) wanted to buy for $44B. I'd say that's a bit more than "very little".
and he's on the path of obliterating Square, now flippantly renamed to Block.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/judge-calls-blocks-purchas...
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/judge-calls-blocks-purchas...
Ignoring the political drama twitter has just fallen so much in quality the last 6 months it will soon be useless if not fixed.
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."
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."