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Twitter's been acting weird for several hours. Turns out that Musk has done something extraordinary:
Of course everyone on Twitter knows that 600 posts/day is basically nothing, so it's basically something to get people to pay for Twitter and get that blue check, but even then it's not an unlimited offer.
Is Musk knowingly just trying to run the website down, or is there some logic here that I'm not seeing? Is this, finally, the much-predicted Death of Twitter?
This is wild and evidence that Twitter's ad revenue has fallen by a lot.
Which, if true, also means that advertising on Twitter has little measurable benefit. Why? Because if Twitter advertising could deliver measurable, immediate value, someone would advertise.
In less than 1 year, Elon has proved the following theories correct:
Most jobs are useless
Most advertising is useless
4D chess at its finest /s
huge, deep-pocked advertisers such as IBM do not really care about ROI or benefit, but rather just want to spread awareness, like about IBM and its Watson program. however, those are also the type of advertisers most averse to risk and may not wish to be associated with Elon
Yes, agree. But given that Twitter laid off 75-90% of staff and also stopped paying bills, costs must be down hugely. Therefore, if they still aren't making money, the price of ads has also fallen off a cliff.
Let's say that, pre-Elon, they got $1 per unit of hand-wavy awareness campaigns. It's possible that now they get $0.10 per unit of actual measurable performance ads. The loss of the hand-wavy shit really hurts because ads don't really work.
Related:
https://archive.is/yBS9E
"When Big Brands Stopped Spending On Digital Ads, Nothing Happened. Why?"
Trigger warning: Boomer-tier mainstream media
Is it known whether the loans are fixed rate? If they aren't, costs are presumably also going up as the Federal Reserve keeps raising interest rates to fight inflation.
Most LBO debt (which this is) is floating rate.
LBOs need to have optional principal payments because they don't know if the company will make enough free cash flow to make principal payments on the debt. Fixed rate debt with a prepayment option is a nightmare for banks to price and risk manage (see SVB passim, or the S&L crisis for an earlier example - LBO debt would be even worse than mortgages because there isn't the huge volume of historical prepayment data) so it tends to be expensive. And private equity firms have the necessary skills and market access to manage their own interest rate risk with derivatives. Most (but by no means all) LBO loan covenants require the borrower to buy an interest rate cap which protects itself (and thus indirectly the lenders) from big interest rate rise.
To be fair, Musk-owned Twitter is exactly the sort of organisation that would "forget" to buy the cap, and it turned out to be a working assumption among Musk-aligned right-wing VCs that they were bailout-eligible.
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I think most "big" loans are fixed rate. You want the cost/cashflow to be predictable.
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marketing for these big companies seems like a billion dollar red queen's race. obviously some advertising needs to exist, but it feels like a massive human inefficiency that there are ads everywhere.
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Web advertising is patronage, not about measurable outcomes.. Once twitter slipped from the grasp of the managerial regime, the advertisers were told to back off.
All the old big company ads disappeared after the the takeover, and some large companies came back months later, but in a greatly diminished number.
Do you truly think Raytheon ads on MSNBC, ads by a company which doesn't sell anything civilians can buy, is using ads as anything but patronage?
Most web advertising is for products or services you can purchase, though. And there are so many different products for accurately measuring the effect of your ad spend. This seems facially false.
I've read accounts claiming online advertising is mostly a sham. That is, there are really little reliable metrics, all the power is in the hands of those selling the ads, etc.
I may post about it if I find the relevant write-up.
That someone can purchase. I've been on twitter for years. I'd estimate maybe 5% of ads I saw were ever relevant - most were irrelevant trash. I mean, job offers for software devs? It's hard to tell how bad their ad targetting was.
Rest complete trash I'd not even glance at or would block immediately like say, ads for Pepsi.
Facebook seems slightly less bad at showing irrelevant stuff, but it hasn't even figured out that as a far-right type I'm not going to buy liquid food substitutes. So online ads are really kind of meh, if even supposedly some of the best companies cannot figure out how to target ads.
Note that the following is a much worse argument than it should be - I should just go through a big advertising product's offerings here and explain how they work.
Advertising is a massive industry. I don't doubt this is true for some buyers and sellers in some areas, but others effectively measure the impacts of ad spend. Teams put a lot of effort from very intelligent people into measuring it, and from what I have seen it works well.
Examples to consider: Some google search terms are much more expensive to advertise on than others. Why? Well, they're terms like 'Insurance', 'loans', 'mortgage', 'attorney', where people are looking to purchase expensive services. How would that price be maintained if they didn't work?
Another example: Multiple small online business owners have told me that advertisements get them most of their customers.
Twitter's advertising has always been terrible (i i r c), I'm referring to internet advertising in general.
You may also just be in a hard-to-target demographic, most of us are outliers. I have never intentionally clicked and will never intentionally click on an ad unless I'm investigating advertising itself, and whenever I notice an ad for a product I think 'this is trying to manipulate me ... I better be extra sure to never buy this!', I use ublock origin, half the sites I spend a lot of time on have no ads, I'm not interested in almost all advertised products, and the weirdness of my internet habits mans ads are poorly targeted at me. If advertising was like that for everyone, very little about the ad industry would be recognizable. But most people are not like that.
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I agree!
"We need all these employees for X, Y, Z reason" - FALSE!
"We spend all this money on advertising because it works" - ALSO FALSE!
So proveth Elon the Shatterer of Sacred Myths. (For the record I believe that Elon is not playing 4d chess here and is just shooting from the hip with poor results).
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