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The Twitter Advertiser Exodus
- 28304283409234 4y agoSoftware services are like puppies. Leave the house and everything is fine. For a while.
- FartyMcFarter 4y agoThe people claiming that Twitter still being up proves they were vastly bloated need to read the following paragraphs until they "sink in": > Our entire account team turned over multiple times in 2 weeks. We had multiple people (AE, AM, analyst, creative specialist) supporting our account and they all vanished without so much as an email. We finally got an email with a name for an AM last week but they quit and we don’t have a new one yet. > Ads UI is very buggy and login with SSO and 2FA broken. One of my campaign managers logged in last week and found all our paused creatives from the past 6 years had been reactivated. Campaign changes don’t save. These things cost us real money.
- kristintynski 4y agoThis is so damning. Twitter always had mediocre ROI as an ad platform in my experience. Now it is literally becoming dangerous for your business. Imagine a 10-100k per day ad campaign from years ago being made live by buggy software and not realizing it...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- bathtub365 4y agoWouldn’t you have standing to sue them if they did this? I guess it depends on the legal agreement you have and how it stipulates they can bill you
- thwayunion 4y agoThere was definitely a bug and everyone knows. No one is going to pay for the accidentally reactivated campaigns, and if Twitter tries to force the matter it'll turn into a bunch of expensive individual suits plus at least one expensive class action for them.
- adgjlsfhk1 4y agosuing them only helps if you think they'll still be running in a year or two.
- kelseyfrog 4y agoThat's the engineering bias at play. While I agree that can still be "up" with a skeleton crew of DevOps and SREs, being "up" doesn't mean making money. It completely ignores the fact that Twitter makes their money on B2B with advertisers and even in 2022, those are human social relations. Firing the people on the Twitter side of that equation destroys those relations and ultimately the dollars they represent. It's perfectly natural for an engineer to de-value B2B relations - I expect it, but at the same time that's the grain of salt we should take when we read an engineer's hot takes.
- autotune 4y ago> with a skeleton crew of DevOps and SREs Except didn't he fire them too?
- FranzFerdiNaN 4y agoHe still has a few hundred people who couldnt afford to lose their job due to H1B status, and probably a couple dozen people who are members of the cult of Musk.
- RC_ITR 4y agoIt's also what Musk's fans often refer to as 'moving the goalposts.' Keeping Twitter up is not success for Elon He needs to make it worth well more than the $44bn he paid for it in order to achieve anything resembling success; the Twitter is going to crash thing was just a dumb hashtag, no one believed that he's just let it go down and stay down. what would that even look like? Yet, not achieving that insane failure is now what people cite as success.
- tbrownaw 4y ago> moving the goalposts The Internet is big and full of people. Is it actually the same people changing their predictions as time and evidence accumulate, or is it just a change in who gets attention?
- 4y ago
- goalieca 4y ago> Ads UI is very buggy and login with SSO and 2FA broken. The rest of Twitter is pretty solid. Why this? This is the money maker. Is it because product wanted the human touch of sales instead of self-serve?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- fragmede 4y agoCustomers like Coke or Nike don't want self service though.
- philliphaydon 4y agoCoke and Nike don't directly deal with twitter tho. Agencies deal with all the delivery of adverts to the different advertising platforms. The agencies use what ever is available. They would sit and make dozens of different sized video files to fit different adverters specifications to upload into Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, etc.
- nemothekid 4y agoThat's only when the budgets are small that they pawn off the execution to some operations intern. For large budgets you have every chef in the kitchen on calls with the Twitter's Ad Sales manager who in turn will make sure all the assets work in the system.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- DisjointedHunt 4y agoBecause the author seems to have a bone to pick.
- orange_joe 4y agoI’ve been noticing bugs, particularly around not having tweets load, and for a few days it seemed that iMessage previews were quite broken.
- throwaway0x7E6 4y ago>Ads UI is very buggy and login with SSO and 2FA broken if all of those have somehow deteriorated in 1-2 weeks, this is further justification for axing the people who made them.
- shagie 4y agoIf I've got something that needs an hour of care every week by a sales person, https://xkcd.com/1205/ https://xkcd.com/1205/ puts it at about 10 days (two weeks) of work to make it more efficient. However, if shaving that 1h a week off takes more than 10 days of work, it is probably better to leave it as it is. https://www.fincher.org/tips/General/SoftwareDevelopment/BugTracking.shtml https://www.fincher.org/tips/General/SoftwareDevelopment/Bug... This bug tracking works on Pain / Effort / Frequency and Risk / Effort / Verifiability Realizing that I'm making up numbers here (and you can make them up too for the story we're telling each other): Pain : 2 (low pain) Effort : 2 (low effort) Freq. : 4 (fairly often) We've got a PEF of 8 there. Note that this is the pain for the hypothetical sales person - not the pain for the end advertiser who the sales person works with. So, what's the risk of making the change to make it so that the sales person doesn't have to do that 1h/week task? How much effort does it take? How easy is it to verify that its actually working? And so now we've got bugs where we can put them on a grid and say "these fixes are the low hanging fruit" while "these other ones are risky and don't get us much." Its quite possible that that this issue would never get into the "this is painful and so we need to do the analysis for it" or "this is low hanging fruit that can be fixed and have a big impact on 'stuff'". Nonetheless, you've got something that takes 1h/week from someone who knows what they're doing with their accounts... and they're not working there anymore. Even in a perfect org, this could fall apart rather quickly.
- mjmsmith 4y agoIf Twitter goes down, it just shows that all those people were incompetent, and he should have fired them. If Twitter stays up, it just shows that all those people were unnecessary, and he should have fired them.
- throwaway0x7E6 4y ago
- DisjointedHunt 4y agoLarge accounts >$1mm spend routinely get zero support on platforms such as Facebook. That side of the business also goes through ridiculous re-orgs. This quote makes it sound as though they had an AE/AM visit them every week ? Most advertisers count themselves lucky to hear from the ads teams once a quarter outside regular scripted emails.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- snowwrestler 4y agoThat’s not my experience at all. My employer is way below $1m annual spend on FB and our in-house ad manager has regular check-in calls with a FB rep who is local to our city. Same with Google and LinkedIn.
- kristintynski 4y agoThose teams help grow revenue. The more help they give, the more the advertiser is likely to increase their spend. They do a lot of heavy lifting to help educate ad teams about about new ad products and software changes.
- KennyBlanken 4y ago> One of my campaign managers logged in last week and found all our paused creatives from the past 6 years had been reactivated. Campaign changes don’t save. These things cost us real money. That....can't be coincidental, and smells an awful lot like fraud.
- nailer 4y agoTwitter advertiser here. Even before the takeover Twitter advertising was broken and unreliable - starting a new campaign on a desktop would fail as the payment UI loaded a bunch of internal DNS names and failed. Note again: this is a few weeks BEFORE Elon took over. So yes its broken, I think they generally weren’t working particularly hard on it before either.
- MonkeyMalarky 4y agoWTAF? At the end of the day, advertisers are the real customers. How is their experience not a priority?!
- nailer 4y agoIDK from what I hear many Twitter employees basically worked on anything they felt like. At Google advertising rules the roost and everyone knows it.
- thwayunion 4y ago>> One of my campaign managers logged in last week and found all our paused creatives from the past 6 years had been reactivated. This happened to me as well. Absolutely wild and will go to my grave before paying a dime.
- samweb3 4y agoThis is likely temporary and advertisers have a short memory. If the platform starts targeting people more effectively and CPMs / CPCs are decent, they will be back. Most of this should be self-serve with third-party marketing agencies helping clients anyway.
- mhoad 4y agoYou don’t seem to understand WHY they are leaving. This isn’t some moral solidarity thing that they are doing for PR reasons.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- mrtksn 4y agoUnlike with engineering, there's very little practical or deep articles about issues like brand safety, etc. and most people seem like parroting the same arguments without anyone explaining why this is the case. You can build Twitter clone from scratch without knowing anything about IT at the beginning and learn it on the process but you can't learn much about brands or advertising or marketing except for some high level talks. I have no idea how so many people can analyse the Twitter ad situation, is everyone well versed in these topics?
- FartyMcFarter 4y agoIt's easy to understand: people in most companies don't appreciate having their ads next to porn, extremist content, or violent content. Especially so when it's posted as a reply to the ads.
- mrtksn 4y agoThe part about them not liking is the obvious one but there's nothing about why they don't like it. Is it something like not liking pineapple on pizza? is it like not liking extremely muscular human body? Or does it actually have some kind of logic? Because if it has logic we can reason about it. I know for a fact that all those brands actually do advertisement on some websites where horrible stuff are discussed.
- bagels 4y agoPeople will screenshot the ad, and post complaints about it on Twitter. Asking why brand XYZ supports <abhorrent thing> and calling for boycotts. Surely that connects the dots well enough to see why a company would not want this?
- kristintynski 4y agoLook at who advertises on 4chan. Elon is taking the platform that direction. That’s who will be all that’s left if he doesn’t figure out content moderation and get his ads team and software fixed ASAP.
- skmurphy 4y agoCatarina left this as a comment to the post: I definitely hope that Twitter can find a better business model than advertising, which I think is fee for service. That has always been the best way, especially for social media. All the disinformation, the serotonin economy, the harassment, the impersonation–ALL the ills are reduced with a fee for service model.
- fractallyte 4y agoThanks for posting this, I would have missed it! This addendum is even more important than the article.
- wobbly_bush 4y agoWhat does fee for service model look like? Charging every user?
- bagels 4y agoIt looks like a bankrupt Twitter, most likely.
- maxfurman 4y agoPay to promote tweets, perhaps? Kind of like the situation for brands on Facebook now, where "organic" reach is strictly controlled to encourage paid promotion, but applied to all users? It might work if Twitter didn't have a billion dollars in debt payments to make every year, on top of their fixed costs.
- rsynnott 4y ago... That's basically just what Twitter ads are anyway, tho. Twitter ads generally take the form of labelled "promoted tweets".
- chucky123 4y ago"For me, the best thing that has come from the Twitter dumpster fire is that I have been posting here instead. Let’s hope for a revival of the independent web, the platforms for which people pay, the Substacks and Word Presses and the like. The better internet we all deserve." Totally agree. Would love for Twitter to be advertiser free. Will also put pressure on other social media apps.
- jsnell 4y agoThis is just a second hand rehash of an anonymous and unverifiable comment on Blind. If there's a real adverising exodus, there must be better sources than that.
- boplicity 4y ago> More than a third of Twitter’s top 100 clients have not advertised on the platform in the past two weeks, data shows https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/11/22/twitter-advertiser-exodus-musk/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/11/22/twitter...
- hw 4y agoAdvertisers could just be pausing till the dust settles - which it eventually will. The faltering economy also is a good reason for advertisers to take this opportunity to revisit their ad spend. This could just be temporary, the next couple months will be telling. Until then it is premature to call advertising on Twitter dead
- mortehu 4y agoWhat is the distribution of this statistic in normal times? I don't know if a third is low or high.
- czbond 4y agoThat means little for the long term. What happens, is many companies do such things to "make a story of it" to appease some advertising base, and then quietly when no on is looking, or cares, in a few months companies quietly re-allocate budget back to such media channels.
- kristintynski 4y agoYeah, but isn’t the issue a long term problem now? If he is committed to little/no moderation, when would things change in a direction that would bring advertisers back? If he wants a free speech free for all ala 4chan, he’s going to have to find an entirely new way to monetize that doesn’t rely on ads.
- roganp 4y agoWow! 80M a year in ad spend for a midsized b2b company...
- cesarvarela 4y agoThe attention economy seems to be "forcing" people to jump to conclusions as fast as possible to write that viral post "X is dead", "goodbye Y", etc. You can't just call for a business model change after only two weeks of such a radical management change. Twitter positioning is very strong and there is no real alternative/competitor. If users keep using Twitter advertisers will come back. It is tiring and makes seemingly smart people look dumb.
- bergenty 4y agoA lot of this is a self fulfilling prophecy. There are many people who don’t want the “new” twitter to succeed and being vocal about it will result in advertisers leaving the platform making the whole thing collapse in on itself. Twitter doesn’t have a valid competitor though (no mastodon is not it) so Elon might end up pulling it off. I hope he doesn’t though and I’m going to do what it takes to influence that decision.
- AlchemistCamp 4y ago> Elon might end up pulling it off. I hope he doesn’t though and I’m going to do what it takes to influence that decision. Wow. That’s a pretty mean-spirited way to go through life. Why not put your efforts into building something positive instead of trying to tear others down?
- macintux 4y agoArguably it’s better in the long term for civilization if narcissistic bullies don’t succeed.
- vilda 4y agoI remember advertiser exodus from YouTube and advertiser exodus from Facebook, twice. They returned, eventually. The bigger problem is current recession. Budgets for ads are cut first.
- notatoad 4y agothe most recent advertiser exodus from youtube was mostly stemmed because youtube put in significant work to increase their content moderation and improve brand safety - that was when all your favourite edgy youtubers started complaining about having their videos demonetized.
- JumpCrisscross 4y agoBingo. The problem is every modern recession seems to be topped by an LBO, and Twitter is this season’s RJR-Nabisco / Harrah’s.
- threeseed 4y agoAs that financial advertiser said the problem with Twitter is that the performance and ROI of their campaigns has plummeted. That has nothing to do with recession and it's nothing like Youtube/Facebook which had external and temporary factors. It's purely to do with Twitter not currently being able to run a competitive ad engine. And it ties directly with a large proportion of the engineers and data scientists being let go.
- brightball 4y agoDoes it though? The ad engine was either in place already or it wasn’t. There shouldn’t be a shift in performance of the engine due to people being let go.
- threeseed 4y agoMachine learning models require regular retraining. And given that there is a code freeze at the moment it's quite likely no updates are going out.
- luxuryballs 4y agoSo basically these companies are proving allegiance to a single political agenda. If you don’t censor those who are critical of people in power, (but only on behalf our specific friends who are in power) then we pull your funding. This has got to be the most unsettling thing I’ve seen in a long time, maybe ever.
- IntelMiner 4y agoCompanies only have one political allegiance. The almighty dollar Turns out people don't really want a Big Mac when it's sandwiched (ha ha) between Nazis and Crypto spam
- bergenty 4y ago
- maldev 4y ago
- bergenty 4y ago
- maldev 4y agoThat proposition got voted down by 15 points though, despite every state senate democrat voting for it, almost every state house democrat (3 abstained the vote). As well as major corporate backing. The yes vote, which failed by 15 votes, had 25.1 million dollars spent vs 1.7 million for no. So if even the most liberal state in the union can't pass it, with such high funding for it, it doesn't seem like it's popular with the general population as you state. Again, 15 point difference, in California, with over 23 more million spent.
- bergenty 4y ago
- rayiner 4y agoMan. If you had told teenage me that on the 2022 equivalent of slashdot, tech folks would attack a communications platform for offending the sensibilities of Fortune 500 advertisers, I wouldn’t have believed you.
- root_axis 4y agoThe advertisers will return eventually. I'm anti-elon and anti-twitter, but as much as I would love to indulge in the schadenfreude, the collapse of twitter seems totally unrealistic.
- coolbreezetft22 4y agoYeah, seems most likely it will continue to run but won't make much revenue and changes will be harder. It's not like HN or sites like 4Chan require a lot to keep running but if Elon is hoping to get some return on his $44billion then that now seems very unrealistic (which based on his desperate and now-defunct 8$/month subscription scheme I assume he is)
- ss2003 4y agoExactly. Yahoo is still here, is it a force like the 2001 Yahoo?
- Kye 4y agoYahoo still had other things like news and stocks once nobody was around for a game of Literati. What does Twitter have when there's no one left to argue aimlessly?
- TMWNN 4y agoIf you think there will ever be a shortage of people arguing aimlessly, all I can say is "Welcome to the Internet".
- Kye 4y agoDid you reply to the wrong comment? I said Twitter, not the internet.
- TMWNN 4y agoI know what you said. My point is that as long as there is a good supply of people wanting to argue pointlessly on the Internet, Twitter will have no shortage of same. I've had an Mastodon account for years; as others have pointed out, it's just not the same thing. (cf. the bien-pensant arguing over which is the "correct" server to join.) The only way to fully replicate Twitter's ability for anyone to potentially address the entire world is to, well, replicate Twitter. No alternative (including, meta-speaking, Hacker News) suffices.
- anonu 4y agoI don't buy it. Ok, I'm not a veteran ad spender, but the claim that after two weeks on Elon-Twitter the metrics shifted so drastically that it wasn't worth it doesn't make sense to me. If anything there's more eyeballs on Twitter than before.
- rconti 4y agoI haven't seen an ad on Twitter in quite awhile, because I read single tweets linked to from somewhere else. I don't have an account, I don't have the mobile app, and I don't browse a feed.
- Proven 4y ago
- dreadlordbone 4y agoIt feels like it's someone trying to manifest a reality.
- hexis 4y agoThis post seems to suggest that the demand for Elon-Twitter failure continues to outstrip supply.
- boringg 4y agoElon has managed to lower everyones expectations on outcomes that if Twitter is still up next year and not bankrupt he will still have credibility. I think this thing is going to turn around in 3 months if it makes through these rocky waters. Whether the product is the same and we like it TBD
- 627467 4y agoI don't know how this ongoing "Twitter revolution" is going to turn out (out of pessimism, I bet the likelyhood of success is 3:7) but it does seem that musk et al. at least diagnosed correctly when saying that Twitter needs to find new revenue sources (other than ads) - NOT because there's anything inherently bad with ad money (there is!) - but because it is now clear that advertisers were not sticky on Twitter ad platform since they are so ready to jump ship en mass within weeks. I have long heard about the idea of the great deception that is online advertisement despite the fact that in last couple of decades people have argued of how effective it is and how critical/unavoidable it is to advertise on certain platforms. It seems clear now that Twitter at least is not a critical platform for many brands.
- PuppyTailWags 4y agoI don't think most ads are critical to specific platforms, especially if those platforms take a sudden turn of ownership. I'm sure if Facebook got bought out, somehow, and the new ownership started telling all of their ad clients that they have literally no plan for them, they would also leave in droves. [My understanding is that this is what Musk effectively did during an end-of-year reestablishment of annual advertising contracts, thereby Twitter got a lot of clients leaving the platform.]
- kristintynski 4y agoWatch him turn it into an OnlyFans clone... seems like the only viable subscription model to earn enough to stay afloat, porn. If he implemented AI Porn features, could earn more. With patrion/substack style subscription features for the non-porn content too, maybe it works?
- ihuman 4y agoTwitter already made that. They launched Subscriptions (previously Super Follows) a year ago. https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/product/2021/introducing-super-follows https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/product/2021/introduci... https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/subscriptions https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/subscriptions
- mensetmanusman 4y agoJust remember we are all dead in 100 years.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- memish 4y ago"A large coalition of political/social activist groups agreed not to try to kill Twitter by starving us of advertising revenue if I agreed to this condition. They broke the deal." https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1595196519598080000 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1595196519598080000 The condition he's referring to is the moderation council he had announced. Apparently they demanded a council, he agreed, announced it, and then they pressured advertisers anyway?
- jhp123 4y agoif unnamed "activist groups" are trying to kill twitter advertising then there should be a paper trail of ... activism, no?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Robotbeat 4y agoI noticed that. There was an announcement of a council, people from certain specific organizations were part of it, then a day later I noticed those same organizations had joined on to pressure advertisers to boycott Twitter. Seemed weird and a bit disheartening, seeing that I was hoping for the various parties to come to some sort of mutually beneficial understanding.
- dagmx 4y agoThis sounds like Illuminati conspiracy from Musk. Who is this “coalition”, and why would they be making deals on whether or not to attack his platform? Also if they were actually activist, why would they be satisfied with just a moderation council? Surely if they cared about causes enough to agree to not criticize Twitter, they would criticize it for other things that would pop up? This sounds like Elon didn’t bother setting up a council (there was never proof he tried) and is looking to spin the story now that advertisers are dropping off. Remember that key advertisers dropped off before he even announced the idea of a council. They even specifically mentioned that his erratic behaviour was part of the reason. I think Elon is going for the classic “victimhood” play to garner sympathy.
- psadri 4y agoTesla doesn’t spend money on advertising. It might be time to change that?
- ncko 4y agoPeople speak as if twitter isn't going to hire more employees. Obviously they can't sustain themselves on the crew they have now long term. They have to realize this and they'll probably start hiring as needed.
- nomel 4y ago> Obviously they can't sustain themselves on the crew they have now long term How is this obvious? If you’ve ever been involved with someone leaving a team, you’ll understand there’s usually some chaos right after, as everyone catches up on absorbing some new responsibilities. Now this, but spread throughout the company. I think it’s too early to say that those who stayed are incapable of taking up the slack. Give them some time ffs. It’s only been two week.
- 4v0v 4y agoI'm really interested in how this will turn out. If he manage to improve Twitter after so many laid off I'll never take any big tech employee seriously ever again.