Twitter’s advertising blues

A few months after acquiring Twitter for $44 billion, Elon Musk called the social platform a “flaming dumpster rolling down the street.” It seems like Twitter’s advertisers would very much agree.

According to the marketing intelligence firm Pathmatics, Twitter’s top ten advertisers spent $7.6 million over the last two months. That’s down 89% from the $71 million spent in September and October of last year.

• And it's not just the top ten – of Twitter’s top 1,000 advertisers in September of last year, only ~37% were still around this January.

🖼️ Big picture: Though the site’s daily user count has increased slightly since 2022, total revenue is down by about 50%, according to Musk. And remember the $44 billion price tag paid for the platform back in October (or was it last April?)? It’s now worth $20 billion.

To remedy this, Musk and Twitter’s sales team have been hard at work trying to woo advertisers back to the platform. One recent initiative is “adjacency controls,” which would allow advertisers to block their ads from running nearby certain keywords and images. The company has also begun offering advertisers substantial discounts to lure them back to the platform.

+Quote Tweet: In unrelated Twitter news, part of the company’s source code was leaked by a GitHub account called FreeSpeechEnthusiast earlier this week.