Twitter is said to have lost $2.5 Billion/year in advertiser money, largely because Twitter's sales teams have not been returning emails from worried Advertisers. That's a pretty huge impact on Twitter's #1 revenue stream (estimated to be $5 Billion in 2021).
Twitter's core product is advertisements. Without sales staff to keep the advertisers, they're clearly losing a ton of money.
Advertising was always degenerating. I know that over the past year, I've been seeing more and more pornographic material in Twitter, and I'm pretty sure advertisers don't like that kind of stuff. But instead of having teams working out those kinks (pun intended), those teams have been simply fired.
So advertisers know that there's no hope for these issues to be fixed anymore, and are now leaving the platform. There's simply not enough developers left to change Twitter or combat the rise of unsavory material.
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There's been many a blogpost about "Airline advertiser didn't want to have its ads appear next to Airline disasters". (Ex: Southwest's shutdowns cause thousands of flight cancellations, it will be talked about on Twitter... does Southwest want its advertisements being shown next to that??).
These are the kinds of things that Twitter's teams worked to prevent. You know, mundane issues but require _constant_ coding to identify as news events cause a rapid change to the online discussion. And its fair: there's no reason why Southwest's advertisements should be shown in a negative light... or for Southwest to be paying for that kind of negative publicity.
Having worked in adtech for a while the more likely scenario is that lots of companies have turned off their ad spend. That isn’t “leaving”, ad spend is volatile coming and going with many motivations is not uncommon. Pausing your campaigns because the ad publisher is a bit broken isn’t permanent.
And whatever is “said” isn’t to be trusted, you won’t get real numbers from a private company and rumors. No doubt there was a big dip around the takeover, but the only thing I’ve heard is a few people complaining about the increased number of ads.
Probably some advertiser tools were broken and the people who’d been talking to those advertisers had been fired, but those are all temporary. Advertisers aren’t going to take some great moral stand unless there’s a clear reason that can be traced back to customers, disliking elon isn’t one of those things.
How is that temporary if — as it appears — the new management has fired the engineering teams which developed the ad tools, and also has no intentions of hiring more people to replace those ad sales teams?
Are you suggesting that Twitter is not going to have developers work on ad tools any longer? Are you suggesting that sales and customer relations for advertisers are just no longer going to be jobs that anyone does and Twitter is going to just hope and pray they get ad money?
Yes lots of reorganization happens, lots of jobs were lost, but, duh, the work is still going to be done, even if there is a re-org gap.
Hum... I'm not the GP, but pretty much that. Yes.
If they have been broken by weeks, the team working on it was fired, no replacement has been brought yet, and it's the one big interface with the people paying money to the company, then it's a good bet that management either doesn't care about money or can't fix the problem.
Don't think Twitter's revenue issues have anything to do with sales staff. Advertising channels/campaigns can and should be 100% automated.
And indeed, advertisers aren't talking about it now. They're just leaving the platform in droves. There's no one _to_ talk about it with. Entire teams (including high ranking executives) that kept relationships with advertisers have been fired.
Twitter doesn't even have anyone answering / categorizing the complaints anymore.
> Don't think Twitter's revenue issues have anything to do with sales staff. Advertising channels/campaigns can and should be 100% automated.
You can't automate news. News is constantly changing. Advertisers _constantly_ are complaining about "X is being shown next to Y news event. Please stop that", and its impossible to predict X, or Y.
Twitter has functioned fine after massive layoffs, and feature velocity has only accelerated. Too many developers have an inflated sense of self importance
There's plenty of advertisers who have blogged about "My emails to Twitter stopped getting answered" around the time of the 75% layoffs. This is well documented.
What do you want the advertisers to do? To just keep giving money to Twitter even when all their contacts have disappeared? There's some pretty basic behaviors that have nothing to do with politics here that Twitter is failing at.
To say that ad sales has to be a manual, high touch channel is simply wrong. Perhaps you have staff on hand for large accounts, but why would e-commerce drop shipping headphone company #7 need to talk to a human?
Disney is most interested in making sure that Mickey Mouse / Winnie the Pooh / Zootopia is not accidentally shown next to furry porn. Southwest doesn't want its ads shown next to airplane disasters. Kellogs doesn't want "Itsssss GREAT" being shown next to the Ukrainian War.
As I said before: you can't predict the "X is being shown next to Y, please stop that" problem. Its impossible to predict X, its impossible to predict Y. You just gotta have email lines with these big companies and promptly issue your programmers / machine learning / data scientists the new algorithms to keep advertisers happy.
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Twitter is 100% the grounds where furry porn, Airplane Disasters, and Ukrainian War disasters are constantly being discussed and shared. Advertisers want protection of their brand, despite the online discourse.
When the tools aren't working as expected, the advertisers then emailed Twitter's API teams. All of those teams have been dismantled, the executives have been fired. With no one left to contact, the advertisers have begun to leave.
Feature velocity for users. Not customers. Also, the deprecation of APIs strongly intimates Twitter Blue was a failure.
... and has driven away, or may drive away, many of the core content providers for their network effects. People who buy a third party client for twitter are generally not casual users. I reached out to a few friends I would consider 'posters' a couple of journos, a couple of 'personal brand' advertiser types... all of their twitter engagement is way down .. from both sides of the conversation. Two of them are now in a 'mostly I just post now' mode. Having conversations has become to hard. The other two are struggling along but they've had to cut way back, one said 'It was like I was building a house with a nailgun, but it got taken away and someone handed me a rock.'
It took me two days without tweetbot to realize it was was one of the only things that kept me actually using twitter. Finally causing me to mothball my account and throw up a personal mastodon install and start re-finding my personal follows there (I'm at about 50% of my list, but i'm finding that mostly what I'm missing is retweets from a few degrees out). My feed's incoming posts per hour are certainly down from twitter by about 60% but I was honestly expecting much lower numbers.
Onboarding is a PITA. With Twitter ceding the ground, this could be a real differentiator. Hell, you could build a licensing component paid to the servers.
It won't help you, currently or maybe ever, pick a server, but it's a great client even in it's beta form.
I mean, yeah? If someone fired all my contacts at a company and didn’t return my emails as my revenue dropped as a result of their changes I would also stop paying them?
It's gone from a break even company to financial ruination.
Twitter is shutting down data centers and offices. Elon Musk has single handedly collapsed the company.
Twitter will shortly be either bankrupt or personally funded by Elon Musk's bank balance by the end of the year.
It would be interesting to have a UI that lets them say that they don't want to be next to X, or they do want to be next to Y, and they pay different prices to appear next to more/less popular things.
I don't know if deliberately breaking their developer API for third party clients counts as "shipping features faster than ever".
Twitter was run as a charity prior to the acquisition. Just as many VC fat tech companies were
Another comment of yours says "quite obvious" about advertising, which doesn't seem to be an industry segment in which you work.
It seems your observations are right in line with Twitter's new owner, to whom everything that's happened over the last few months has also been "obvious," and mostly wrong.
I’d rather take his side than the small minded and intellectually weak detractors.
Just because things tend to be a certain way, doesn’t make it optimal or right. Evidence, all of history where bad practices were pervasive and common and later usurped by better practices.
Maybe use forethought and critical thinking rather than credentialism and groupthink
And people who tend to succeed at most things they do, tend to do so for a reason. It’s effectively statistically impossible for it to be sheer coincidence/luck.
Or should I just pick random “logical fallacy” links to put in my replies instead?
I simply noted you appear incapable of perceiving Elon as making bad decisions, which is kind of funny, since he seemed to think agreeing to buy Twitter was a bad decision, and was in the process of losing a court case about it before he saw the writing on the wall and closed the agreement.
If he actually is making bad decisions, I think the halo effect is at play.
Saying you have a degree in this or that, or title X/Y without having any results to show for it is credentialism. Unfortunately far too pervasive in our industry.
By your logic we can’t consider any accomplishments from somebody’s past as a reliable indicator of their future results.
Which is obviously not true. “Credentialism” is giving far too much weight to low barrier to entry and easy to accomplish titles.
Ignoring past results, the fact that Twitter is functioning fine after 80% layoffs has already validated the decision to downsize. No need to look to the past.
(And I'll say your rosy impression of Twitter seems a little strange for a supposedly objective observer, given the recent outages/pervasive legal problems/chaotic feature rollouts/various fits and reversals/overall dysfunction that has characterized that company since it was acquired by Elon Musk.)
Fortunately I couldn’t care less if somebody decides not to work with me because they disagree with my opinions. People who care about results will get ahead, those that don’t won’t
> Nothing nasty about my comment, its a factual response to the parent comment.
I called out your use of the word "obviously" without factual basis, and you responded with insults.
Insults and praise for the CEO of Twitter, which is irrelevant, since he still has not made any statement whatsoever on the subject, which was entirely the point of my initial comment.
What in earth are you talking about? He brought his way into those companies. I think you are confusing Elon Musk the fictional PR character who exists only in paid press releases with Elon Musk.
Elon Musk's success was being the CEO of a slimy payment processor.
When he makes a pronouncement and then reverses that pronouncement, one or the other was incontrovertibly wrong. Whether he was wrong first and right later, or right first and wrong later, the list of reversals at twitter is a long one, starting before he bought the company.
He tendered an offer that skipped due diligence, then attempted to avoid doing what he'd agree to do, invoking the due diligence he'd explicitly skipped in the process. Then they day before he would have to open up his financial records in court, he reversed his reversal and closed the deal. Since then he's stated multiple times he regrets buying twitter.
However many times you count him being certain-but-wrong in that story, it's more than zero, despite the financial success of his unrelated companies, and despite your unwarranted personal insults.
Everyone hates on Dorsey because he essentially turned Twitter into a walled garden (killed third-party clients + RSS support), but really, how else are you supposed to make a startup that got millions in funding profitable? Just by giving your stuff away?
And it's fine that they didn't. It's even fine that they shut down the API. But the lack of communication is ridiculous. Just tell people what the fuck is happening. They don't have to like it, but complete ghosting is the way you burn bridges completely down.
Twitter to Devs: Don't Make Twitter Clients... Or Else [2011]
https://mashable.com/archive/twitter-api-clients
Twitter's API Update Cuts Off Oxygen to Third-Party Clients [2012]
https://mashable.com/archive/twitter-api-big-changes
(how could Elon do this!?)
I mean it's within his right to do it, and I can even see the arguments. However, to do it without even a press release let alone notice. Without even answering support tickets from those third party clients. Just an utter failure of management.
Desperation from the remaining devs? I mean, I can crank out crap as fast as anyone wants me to if it doesn't have to work right.
- They are experimenting more aggressively. - Depends on what features you build and time that it take to build those. - How much can you afford to delay the tech debt.
When the CEO is focused on rolling out features faster, everyone rallies behind. Does it mean the company is operating great. End of 2023 will be a good indicator.
Also note that recent tooling around LLMs (eg. ChatGPT) will improve aggregate efficiency.
Do we have an independent source that doesn't have a history of dishonesty confirming this? Does it have a creative definition of 'shipping', 'feature', and 'faster'? Are there any long-tail dangers that have, or have the potential to blow up in Twitter's face from it?
My car goes faster and gets better MPG ever since I stripped out the weight of the braking system...
wow that sounds insane? I wish you would have had a source attached to this (an actual source btw, not some online journalist writing an opinion piece)
over the past 2 to 3 weeks the ads shown to me have gotten more and more small fish, bottom of barrel, and wildly unfitting for me. and weird.
its easy to predict the ones I'm seeing are by advertisers bidding much lower $ than the previous average. reasonable to extrapolate and predict Twitter's advertising income has likely crashed. I've heard from enough other people all experiencing the same shift over the same period
So basically there's been a team suppressing any really bad news about any company who advertises on Twitter? Am I reading that right? And you want them back?
my experience at two big tech companies said this extremely overdue.
especially since about 2012.. lots of added head count. managers and sr. managers and directors #1 priority on increasing head count to grow empires and get promotions. it elephant in the room supported by easy US fed policy. uncomfortable truth these people dont want to admit.
what is vision for these new teams? if stock price is $100/share does director X’ org contribute $.50 or $1 or $10? many teams are negative contributors to this equation.
actually much of attribution and downstream impact was gamed. the founders slowly left and replaced with professional managers. no vision. no obsession with features. little thought to value. instead they see prestigious job. “i have 150 people report to me.” that kind of discourse mainstream. indirect way of bragging “look how important i am.”
maybe 15% of employees at both companies providing actual value building new things that bring revenue. another 15-20% just support legacy cruft with software patches. no feature work. no innovation. large teams of engineers and managers resting and vesting.
it is honestly entitlement and horrible joke. why these people entitled to $200-500k+ salaries??? its like this country built fake economic class of worker. little to no economic output.
I'm sure that's the case always, but I'm convinced it's the case more often than many of us realize. I also recall this being discussed in David Graeber's book "Bullshit Jobs"
Firing people at this scale would have been pretty expensive just a few month back, PR wise. Right now, a lot less so. So you might be tempted to think of the current climate as a good opportunity to shed some fat, to the point where you go into it with the idea of hiring back right away and being able to do so at better conditions. The market has relaxed.
Compare it to a few month back, where switching jobs (= firing your employer) was a great way to automagically increase your pay. It works both ways.
I have to assume that, in the same way that glass palace FANG offices and around the clock full-service employee pampering are doing something for (potential) employees, the idea of large scale firings will move the needle in the opposite direction. Clearly, it's not only about who pays most.
To give an example in microcosm, this news about layoffs is affecting my decision of what UI framework to use with .NET projects. .NET MAUI was already low on my list because I don't trust Microsoft to commit to supporting a UI framework long-term, but if any of these cuts are to the MAUI team then it will put it out of the running completely for me. I'm sure there are other devs in similar circumstances (and who likely rank MAUI much higher as a candidate than I do) who will weigh this layoff announcement into their decision. And there will be some who ignore it because they see it as a general symptom of the economy, not a sign of trouble at Microsoft etc.
$MSFT ticking up ...
Especially the ones that spend all day bragging about how they're a top performer on hackernews. :D
In both technical and product axes Twitter has already deteriorated massively, possibly beyond repair and the company might not make it to 2024, so I wouldn't call that "negligible".
I think early on I heard there was a 2FA outage? That was resolved fairly quickly.
The only issue is dumb changes, like the "no linking to other platforms" rule that was announced and then rolled back within the day, or adding view counts that add no value. But none of that is technical issues.
> I'm pretty sure breaking 3rd party clients was intentional.
> Twitter had tightened the reigns on them years ago because it just cost them money to keep them alive. It makes sense that would be first on the chopping block when they're looking for cost-saving measures, and I figured it was inevitable regardless of the Elon takeover.
I don't think that was technical ineptitude, but rather a cost-saving decision from the business.
That said, I concur that Twitter is doomed. It was already not very profitable before advertisers started backing away, and Elon's tendency to "move fast and ignore regulations" won't serve him very well in the current climate of tightly regulated social media. Elon's piggy bank is no longer unlimited due to the revaluation of TSLA and the tendency for his huge sales to drive the price down even further.
Twitter had tightened the reigns on them years ago because it just cost them money to keep them alive. It makes sense that would be first on the chopping block when they're looking for cost-saving measures, and I figured it was inevitable regardless of the Elon takeover.
I have a feeling it's coming for reddit too. That one I dread cause their official app is horrible.
Here's an example I just pulled up that's the second thread on my feed: https://twitter.com/LordCarsonEsq/status/1615134592222257155
There are six replies here. If you refresh enough, you can see a different subset of two replies, so that's probably not a spam-filter.
I think the mistake you're making here is assuming that your average tech CEO is paying attention to the same degree you are. They aren't. They don't have time to notice all the many little things that degraded already, they just saw that the site didn't go down a week later and moved on.
Musk has enough money and influence to stress out his employees and userbase for decades.
It's like airline pricing. One airline has a sale, others follow (competition heating up), then, one airline hikes fares, others follow (as competition cools down).
It's hard to separate the wheat from the chaff without hiring both and sorting after the fact when you're actually informed by experience.
The economic downturn just gives excellent cover for what's an arguably necessary part of a cycle akin to forests burning.
Sure leadership and deviation from the norm would be refreshing (and smart), but that's that the era we're in.
In finance circles it is referred to as “taking a big bath”. When everyone is doing it, you write off past goodwill from bad acquisitions, lay off redundant employees, etc, all to emerge clean on the other side. Having used the cover of everyone doing it, you aren’t punished.