Musk admits advertisers haven’t returned to Twitter, ad revenue down 50%
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Didn't the "return" of advertisers he lauded a few months follow on huge discounts for the advertisers?
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Early starter problems, like gutting and setting on radioactive fire an established company with an already go-to product? Interesting.
Can't wait for his pioneering innovations in the far-right/bigot social media space.
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its a private company, he has no obligation to tell the truth about the state of business at all (except in private communications to shareholders).
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There must be some way that Weird Al Yankovic can help Elon with this situation...
I know.......... EAT IT! ELON!!! You shitbag.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBuszEbobq0
I know.......... EAT IT! ELON!!! You shitbag.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBuszEbobq0
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I can't tell if you're a parody sarcasm account, or actually serious, and I suspect no one else can either. If you are, then you should probably start including /s at the end of your comment.
If you're not and you're actually serious, then this is your hourly reminder to breathe, since I'm assuming you need actual reminders on doing that.
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I wouldn't be so sure about that. The word on the street is that he got very, very close to being margin called at Tesla. Offloading another $13 billion in stocks last year would have tanked the price, necessitating a larger sale.
Once he signed the contract, there was no real out. Getting other people to pitch in lets him keep control of Tesla. The crazy part to me is why investors agreed to the deal in the first place, when the basic economics are so obviously untenable, although people have bet on dumber things in the past.
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Congrats, Elon! You’re more than half way to your goal of getting 50% of your revenue from subscribers!
By the way that cash flow number… you should under GAAP probably also be including the half billion of unpaid severance, plus unpaid lawyer bills, plus unpaid rent. Good news though, you don’t know what your upcoming fines will be from abandoning moderation pledges or consent decrees, so I don’t think you have to count them yet!
Seems like everything is pretty much going to plan.
By the way that cash flow number… you should under GAAP probably also be including the half billion of unpaid severance, plus unpaid lawyer bills, plus unpaid rent. Good news though, you don’t know what your upcoming fines will be from abandoning moderation pledges or consent decrees, so I don’t think you have to count them yet!
Seems like everything is pretty much going to plan.
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Ooh like the Pizza Hut-branded rocket that brought the Energiya module up to the ISS? Russia still hates that actually happened.
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A lot of breaking news gets faster details there than anywhere else. For my needs, and about the only thing I still use it for, the war in Ukraine gets better, more detailed coverage there than anywhere else that I've seen, especially if you avoid general words like counterattack and search for specific cities like Klishchiivka, Berkhivka, Kupiansk, and Staromaiorske (the searches from the last few days for me). I'd love a better platform, and some of it is over on Mastodon, but most haven't made the leap yet.
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I would assume he's talking about the massive cuts he made after loading the company with an incredible amount of debt. Publicly traded companies that are near bankruptcy trade for pennies. Not the $25-35 range it was running in pre-Musk.
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I don't know about your experience, but lately for me more than 50% of ads consists in dropshippers with a randomly generated "shop" name, a randomly generated handler, a AI-generated logo, showcasing a cheap, low-quality gadget from some untrustworthy Chinese source sold off as a revolutionary life-saver, and no chance to reply and expose the scam (only quote tweets, but only a few read them).
Irony is, sometimes it's Twitter itself that warns the readers with its usual "context" panel below the promoted tweet. Twitter playing against itself haha...
If that's the future of Twitter advertisement, I'm not surprised it's such a disaster. And it's so, so very sad that Elon was once viewed as an environmental supporter when has made Twitter another means of the most inconsiderate capitalist commercial economy.
Irony is, sometimes it's Twitter itself that warns the readers with its usual "context" panel below the promoted tweet. Twitter playing against itself haha...
If that's the future of Twitter advertisement, I'm not surprised it's such a disaster. And it's so, so very sad that Elon was once viewed as an environmental supporter when has made Twitter another means of the most inconsiderate capitalist commercial economy.
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Its kind of amazing that he manages to fine new and unique ways to prove how terrible he is as a business man EVERY SINGLE DAY.
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So close, yet so far. Waiting for the advertising share to be reduced to just the same outfits that are deeply connected to the cesspool that overbearingly dominate the Twitter space these days: sexist, racist, bigots, Andrew Tate worshipping, anti-LGBTQ, and conspiracy theorist, crypto currency, pyramid seminar, alpha sigma, GQP, types.
We know that crowd has the funding capacity of a trump rally circa 2023. Let's go bruv!
We know that crowd has the funding capacity of a trump rally circa 2023. Let's go bruv!
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Assuming he’s not just outright lying about the magnitude of the drop - which is entirely possible since, with the US and US states being pretty much the only major western jurisdictions that don’t require private companies to make their audited financials publicly available, the only people who could contradict (I assume the lenders and co-investors get the audited numbers) him are almost certainly bound by confidentiality agreements - I suspect there’s some rounding down to the nearest half integer going on.
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I logged in today to get in touch with a specific person, and my ads were betting shops and pro-Vegan outfits.
Quality stuff.
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If you stop to think about it, Elon Musk is a very, VERY successful and impactul person, perhaps one of the most impactful people of the last 100 years:
- an excellent entertainer -- he provides basically non-stop laughs and general entertainment to all of us, who follow his exploits
- a great educator -- he has provided so much material for business and law schools to go through by now that they could fill their entire 3-year curriculums for decades to come with just that
- a creative muse -- you just know that there will be hundreds of books, movies and TV-shows based on all this over time
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OrangeCream
Ars Legatus Legionis
He's really trying to build a system where people can be racist without consequence, and also expect advertisers to pay for that privilege?
It's not as if Germany won WWII and it's not as if Communist China and Russia own the majority of the internet (yet), so he's stuck with trying to grow a niche user base.
Apple gets away with it because they charge significantly more than their competitors. I don't think his user base is sufficiently wealthy that he can do that too.
It's not as if Germany won WWII and it's not as if Communist China and Russia own the majority of the internet (yet), so he's stuck with trying to grow a niche user base.
Apple gets away with it because they charge significantly more than their competitors. I don't think his user base is sufficiently wealthy that he can do that too.
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Maybe we collectively agree we won't feed this obvious troll account?
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Yes but.
The sheer number of people Musk fired would net Twitter, just in reduced payroll, $800 million to $1 billion a year. Then there is everything that isn't needed to provide those people a way to work. Everything else being equal (which it isn't) that would have netted Twitter enough to pay for the increased debt load that Musk foisted on the company and still have some left to increase profit.
Problem is that the firing of people costs money, so the first year Twitter wouldn't see that kind of return. Same thing goes for the infrastructure that isn't needed anymore, for the amount of people fired it easily takes a year (or two) to complete everything and see those costs be reduced as well. Which is most likely one of the reasons for the boneheaded decision to not honor those commitments by Musk, and which is going to cost Twitter much more. The other reason that it wasn't Musk or Twitter under Musk that agreed to those commitments when they were made (just ignore that the contract that Musk signed said he'd have to honor those commitments, the guy has a clear reading and learning disability when it comes to contracts).
This leaves out the problem that while every company will end up with fat that can be cut removing 80%+ of employees is the equivalent of selling most major organs not performing liposuction. We're already seeing the negative effects of that boneheaded decision with the FTC not receiving the documents it asked for (seeing that the people collecting those were fired) to see if Twitter was upholding its end of the consent decree nor the FTC getting the documents that it is supposed to get to if Twitter basically alters anything with regard to customers. Or the lawsuit in Germany that could theoretically cost Twitter more then €30 billion (won't happen but the cap is €50 million per violation and there have been 600+ recorded violations) due to not having moderator/abuse/hate speech teams anymore.
It also doesn't help with the complaint that Musk himself voiced, that the infrastructure is aged. Well he just fired the people capable of keeping it together and/or improve on it to remove part of the tech debt accrued. Which is why you get absurdities as Twitter DDOSing itself and the inability to rate limit static IP addresses. Things will get worse the longer this drags on since there are just not enough people left who know to put out fires, to actually put out fires, to prevent degradation of the service, document everything, direct those people, etc.
And then there are minor problems as no more communications department, no contacts for advertisers (the reason that Musk had to go to Apple himself, the Apple team was fired), almost no HR, almost no legal, and almost no finance people left.
So problems will keep accumulating, everything looks fine then the dam burst and it is all over.
I've a bet on the period between late October and late January when this particular house of cards collapses, that is without Musk funneling his own money into Twitter to keep it alive.
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I would very much like Musk to answer this single question about his Twitter strategy:
"Given the repeated financial failings of 100% of the many right-wing twitter knock-offs that existed in the years prior to your purchase of twitter, wtf made you think that turning twitter itself in a right-wing twitter knockoff would lead to financial success?"
"Given the repeated financial failings of 100% of the many right-wing twitter knock-offs that existed in the years prior to your purchase of twitter, wtf made you think that turning twitter itself in a right-wing twitter knockoff would lead to financial success?"
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Technically yes, but twitter sold the trombone’s slide to aid the revenue efforts, so it might sound a little different than you’re accustomed to. Subscribe to Blue and you can access a recording of the whole trombone in RealPlayer format!!
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What you mean? He’s an official founder and he has the court papers to prove it! /s
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Hot on the heels of this fantastic news, we get this from Mr. Musk's favorite US Senator.
Elizabeth Warren urges SEC to investigate Tesla over Twitter ties, corporate governance
Good times.
Elizabeth Warren urges SEC to investigate Tesla over Twitter ties, corporate governance
Good times.
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My guess is he'll first of all funnel money from SpaceX, Tesla and as many of his other companies as he can swing the advertising budget for.
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Sometimes my conscience bugs me about my ad / script blocking add-ons, but Twitter isn't one of those cases. Thanks for confirming that there's no reason to worry.
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Somewhere in a desert far away, wire cutters are being sharpened...
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Which is telling in a different way: Musk has thrown the advertising doors open to anyone with a pulse, no matter how scammy, and still claims that his revenue is down 50%. That, in turn, implies that revenue from Twitter's original advertiser base is down more like 95%, that nearly everyone who used to spend money on Twitter has walked away.
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Twitter "did not see the increase in advertising revenue that was expected in June," but that July is looking "a bit more promising."
So... June went poorly, but certainly the month a 100m user competitor burst on the scene is the month you'll knock it out of the park.
So... June went poorly, but certainly the month a 100m user competitor burst on the scene is the month you'll knock it out of the park.
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It’s been about a month+ since I was last on Twitter.
The ads were getting very irrelevant to me and often started to appear like spam/scam. I ended up muting/blocking every ad I saw.
Then I decided to mute/block all Gold and Blue checkmarks which meant pretty much every advertiser that showed.
It got annoying because those mutes/blocks continued to compound the issue by surfacing even more trash ads.
Between that bad ad experience, the rest of the platform - as a consumer - has rapidly degraded. How long must I micromanage my account in order to see anything relevant to me?
Add in that bots can now pay for priority through Gold and Blue checks and how that spread misinformation and hate across all aspects of Twitter - including ads - and it makes for quite the toxic environment for all users: Advertisers, Creators and Consumers.
What did Twitter expect from all this? Are they really so disillusioned by Musk that they believe they are headed in the right direction?
The ads were getting very irrelevant to me and often started to appear like spam/scam. I ended up muting/blocking every ad I saw.
Then I decided to mute/block all Gold and Blue checkmarks which meant pretty much every advertiser that showed.
It got annoying because those mutes/blocks continued to compound the issue by surfacing even more trash ads.
Between that bad ad experience, the rest of the platform - as a consumer - has rapidly degraded. How long must I micromanage my account in order to see anything relevant to me?
Add in that bots can now pay for priority through Gold and Blue checks and how that spread misinformation and hate across all aspects of Twitter - including ads - and it makes for quite the toxic environment for all users: Advertisers, Creators and Consumers.
What did Twitter expect from all this? Are they really so disillusioned by Musk that they believe they are headed in the right direction?
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It is bullshit. Twitter was profitable before Elon. Over 60% of the daily costs Elon cited (losing 4 mil a day) is directly due to the $1bil a year twitter now has to pay for Elon's debt in purchasing twitter (about 2.7 mil). And that's if we even trust the 4 mil number. Combine that with losing 50% of your ad revenue (also due entirely to Elon), and it's pretty obvious what happened at twitter. Elon very deftly destroyed it himself.
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Again, it was destroyed the moment he signed the paperwork and saddled Twitter with all the debt. From there, failure was inevitable. It was, at that instant, no longer a question of if, but a question of when it would fail. The best management in the world would merely have delayed the bankruptcy, and Elon Musk is not the best management in the world.
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Leaving Twitter operate as it was when he purchased it would have been more successful. At last the revenue was there to try to reinvent itself. Now there isn't even enough revenue coming in to pay the month's rent.
EDIT: Disregard, I forgot about all the debt Twitter incurred just getting purchased. No way to service that even when Twitter had advertisers.
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