So, normally, ad businesses are pretty immune to high level drama. When you pay for eyeballs, even if the owner is a schmuck, the eyeballs themselves don't drop that drastically. If a bunch of advertisers drop you, other ones will swoop in for those eyeballs at the lower price.
A key thing he leaked today was that only 30% of Twitter's ad revenue was performance based. For the other 70% of brands on Twitter, they are only there because they wanted to be there. No one is losing money by pulling Twitter ads. No one is swooping in to replace them.
Soooo... on one hand Musk is probably just being Musk here. But I'm not sure that one of the things that didn't happen here is that the Twitter board and executives, understanding that there was no real path to near-term profitability and an impending downturn, forced a now-broke guy to cash them out.
> A key thing he leaked today was that only 30% of Twitter's ad revenue was performance based. For the other 70% of brands on Twitter, they are only there because they wanted to be there. No one is losing money by pulling Twitter ads. No one is swooping in to replace them.
Didn't see where this was mentioned. Does this mean that like 30% were under contract, the other 70% can stop any time?
"Performance advertising" is a marketing term, as distinct from "brand advertising".
Brand advertising: feel good stuff, like the Coca-Cola polar bears. You can't measure an immediate impact, you just saturate the market with it to ensure you're top of mind. Brands often have a big pool of money to spend here, and are somewhat indifferent to whether they spend it on Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, etc, etc, so long as they hit certain metrics about demographics and reach.
Performance advertising: you're trying to get a specific action from the user. You often build these campaigns to be ROI positive. For example, you spend $100 to get clicks on "house insurance" ads, you expect to get $200 of sales.
All else being equal, advertisers prefer to run ads on sites where they're not adjaced to controversial things. For performance ads, you might swallow your distaste and tolerate the ad being next to controversial things -- after all, you can directly measure if they're producing the ROI you want. For brand ads, it's much squishier, so you're more likely to take your spend somewhere "brand safe".
A bit of an oversimplification, but generally true. Depending on your market, you may love controversial topics as it gives you more niche targeting. It's just that broad consumer brands with the deepest pockets are so diversified that they don't need any particular platform.
There's also an open secret in advertising that most of this money is wasted. Coca-Cola doesn't nearly need all the advertising it gets - but the entire brand advertising industry engages in heavy rent-seeking.
So when Musk says that "activists" ran advertisers off of the platform (despite never being able to run them off of Google, Facebook, etc), I think there may be some truth to it. Most advertisers never found much value on Twitter, and largely only because the admins themselves were proponents of Twitter.
The irony of Musk running the bots off of Twitter is that they consisted entirely of his audience who would have been interested in performance-based advertising.
For that definition of "activist" that means "people dropping the n-bomb all over twitter," I suppose.
In all seriousness, though, it is in fact hate speech that has driven advertisers away. It's not at all difficult to measure using keywords and sentiment analysis, and what has happened is an immediate order of magnitude more hate speech after Elon took over. That kind of environment does not attract conventional advertisers.
> ...a range of terms were examined to see if frequency of use increased in
correlation to the change in ownership and stated platform focus. The terms included
vulgar and hostile terms for individuals based on race, religion, ethnicity, and
orientation. Collection of the totality of Tweets using these words in the period
immediately before and after Musk’s acquisition was done to assess both frequency and
the rate of with which this content was posted. Tweetbinder’s sentiment analysis tool,
which measures positive or negative tone in Tweets, was utilized to assess potential
hostility in the collected data.
> Specifically, the seven-day average of Tweets using the studied hate terms prior to
Musk’s acquisition was never higher than 84 times per hour. From midnight on October
28 to 12 noon, however, hate terms were Tweeted some 4,778 times. Calculation of
potential reach (i.e., the potential number of times a term posted in Twitter could have
been viewed) was in excess of three million. As such, this research suggests that there
was an immediate, visible, and measurable spike in hate terms on Twitter after Musk
took over as CEO.
> I'm not sure that one of the things that didn't happen here is that the Twitter board and executives, understanding that there was no real path to near-term profitability and an impending downturn, forced a now-broke guy to cash them out.
Twitter didn't force anyone to do anything, and it wasn't their idea. Musk offered to buy them w/o due diligence.
The Board has a fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders. They can say NO to a "serious offer" only if they can claim with confidence that the offer is undervaluing the assets, or if there is another better offer. Neither was true for Twitter.
Things are going good. The Chief Information Security Officer, the Chief Privacy Officer and the Chief Compliance Officer are all gone for good, along with half of the employees, basically everyone needed to keep things running. It is a remote-first company, but everyone is ordered to work from the office.
Update: Twitter's Head of Trust and Safety and Head of Ad Sales are also gone.
Meanwhile Elon Musk is running around haphazardly trying to monetize the entire platform, sacrificing verification for no reason and replacing it with a paid tier. Other platforms like Youtube offer to verify you for authenticity when you reach a certain number of subscribers, which doesn't have to do anything with also having a paid tier. The difference is that Youtube Premium pays content creators, not charges them like Twitter Blue. Sure, content creators will pay to be featured, but there aren't that many of them.
I've seen quite a few of the still-existing Twitter employees openly mocking him on twitter at this point with joking references to being "hardcore" and other memes that seem to be coming out of this disastrous all-hands.
Its almost difficult to believe at this point that he isn't intentionally running the company into the ground.
> Other platforms like Youtube offer to verify you for authenticity when you reach a certain number of subscribers
Well, if there's one thing to try to commend Musk here for, it's that he's trying to move away from just another "users are the product" business model.
I really hope so. The sooner Twitter ceases to exist, the better.
Just think; journalists would actually have to start researching stories again, instead of the endless 'X tweeted this and Y tweeted that' which seems to pass for in-depth news gathering these days.
And, closer to home; maybe people on HN will stop linking to fucking tweets as news stories
15 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 52.0 ms ] threadA key thing he leaked today was that only 30% of Twitter's ad revenue was performance based. For the other 70% of brands on Twitter, they are only there because they wanted to be there. No one is losing money by pulling Twitter ads. No one is swooping in to replace them.
Soooo... on one hand Musk is probably just being Musk here. But I'm not sure that one of the things that didn't happen here is that the Twitter board and executives, understanding that there was no real path to near-term profitability and an impending downturn, forced a now-broke guy to cash them out.
Didn't see where this was mentioned. Does this mean that like 30% were under contract, the other 70% can stop any time?
"Performance advertising" is a marketing term, as distinct from "brand advertising".
Brand advertising: feel good stuff, like the Coca-Cola polar bears. You can't measure an immediate impact, you just saturate the market with it to ensure you're top of mind. Brands often have a big pool of money to spend here, and are somewhat indifferent to whether they spend it on Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, etc, etc, so long as they hit certain metrics about demographics and reach.
Performance advertising: you're trying to get a specific action from the user. You often build these campaigns to be ROI positive. For example, you spend $100 to get clicks on "house insurance" ads, you expect to get $200 of sales.
All else being equal, advertisers prefer to run ads on sites where they're not adjaced to controversial things. For performance ads, you might swallow your distaste and tolerate the ad being next to controversial things -- after all, you can directly measure if they're producing the ROI you want. For brand ads, it's much squishier, so you're more likely to take your spend somewhere "brand safe".
There's also an open secret in advertising that most of this money is wasted. Coca-Cola doesn't nearly need all the advertising it gets - but the entire brand advertising industry engages in heavy rent-seeking.
So when Musk says that "activists" ran advertisers off of the platform (despite never being able to run them off of Google, Facebook, etc), I think there may be some truth to it. Most advertisers never found much value on Twitter, and largely only because the admins themselves were proponents of Twitter.
The irony of Musk running the bots off of Twitter is that they consisted entirely of his audience who would have been interested in performance-based advertising.
For that definition of "activist" that means "people dropping the n-bomb all over twitter," I suppose.
In all seriousness, though, it is in fact hate speech that has driven advertisers away. It's not at all difficult to measure using keywords and sentiment analysis, and what has happened is an immediate order of magnitude more hate speech after Elon took over. That kind of environment does not attract conventional advertisers.
> ...a range of terms were examined to see if frequency of use increased in correlation to the change in ownership and stated platform focus. The terms included vulgar and hostile terms for individuals based on race, religion, ethnicity, and orientation. Collection of the totality of Tweets using these words in the period immediately before and after Musk’s acquisition was done to assess both frequency and the rate of with which this content was posted. Tweetbinder’s sentiment analysis tool, which measures positive or negative tone in Tweets, was utilized to assess potential hostility in the collected data.
> Specifically, the seven-day average of Tweets using the studied hate terms prior to Musk’s acquisition was never higher than 84 times per hour. From midnight on October 28 to 12 noon, however, hate terms were Tweeted some 4,778 times. Calculation of potential reach (i.e., the potential number of times a term posted in Twitter could have been viewed) was in excess of three million. As such, this research suggests that there was an immediate, visible, and measurable spike in hate terms on Twitter after Musk took over as CEO.
https://www.montclair.edu/school-of-communication-and-media/...
https://www.montclair.edu/newscenter/2022/10/31/study-finds-...
Twitter didn't force anyone to do anything, and it wasn't their idea. Musk offered to buy them w/o due diligence.
Twitter's board absolutely had the right to sue for specific performance, but they didn't have to.
The Board has a fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders. They can say NO to a "serious offer" only if they can claim with confidence that the offer is undervaluing the assets, or if there is another better offer. Neither was true for Twitter.
Update: Twitter's Head of Trust and Safety and Head of Ad Sales are also gone.
Meanwhile Elon Musk is running around haphazardly trying to monetize the entire platform, sacrificing verification for no reason and replacing it with a paid tier. Other platforms like Youtube offer to verify you for authenticity when you reach a certain number of subscribers, which doesn't have to do anything with also having a paid tier. The difference is that Youtube Premium pays content creators, not charges them like Twitter Blue. Sure, content creators will pay to be featured, but there aren't that many of them.
Its almost difficult to believe at this point that he isn't intentionally running the company into the ground.
Well, if there's one thing to try to commend Musk here for, it's that he's trying to move away from just another "users are the product" business model.
>Downloaded videos can be played offline for up to 29 days. After that, you'll need to reconnect your device to the internet.
That sounds like DRM. The page also seems to suggest that you need to use youtube.com to watch videos, not a file on your system.
I wouldn't now, I use yt-dlp that can also make use of YouTube cookies, since otherwise YouTube is not DRM protected like Netflix is for example.
Just think; journalists would actually have to start researching stories again, instead of the endless 'X tweeted this and Y tweeted that' which seems to pass for in-depth news gathering these days.
And, closer to home; maybe people on HN will stop linking to fucking tweets as news stories