Twitter’s ad revenue drops 89% since Elon Musk’s takeover
Twitter had started offering advertisers major discounts to woo them back to the microblogging platform.
Hundreds of advertisers stopped spending on Twitter after Elon Musk completed the $44 billion deal to take over the microblogging website and has brought wary of changes to the social media platform. Months later, many still haven't returned despite its sales team's efforts to woo them back with steep discounts and new safety tools.
According to estimates from Pathmatics, the top advertisers on Twitter spent $71 million on ads from September to October last year, while the figure dropped to just $7.6 million (89% decline) in the past two months, Bloomberg news reported.
Elon Musk earlier said that the company's revenue has fallen by 50% since October despite a slight uptick in daily users. A decline in revenue has resulted in a massive fall in advertising.
Twitter's top ad customers included HBO, Amazon, IBM, and Coca-Cola. Major brands such as Mondelez International Inc., Coca-Cola Co., Merck & Co., Hilton Worldwide Holdings Inc., and AT&T Inc. still hadn’t resumed ad spending on the platform as of February
People familiar with the situation said that major media agencies like IPG and Horizon Media, which advised clients to pause or consider suspending their Twitter campaigns after Musk took over, have not yet encouraged marketers to return.
“Our initial recommendation to clients after Musk took over was a ‘red light’, as in, stop spending. We’re still advising clients to proceed with caution — the light has changed to ‘amber’ as the company still appears to be in a chaotic state,” one media buyer said as quoted by Bloomberg.
Musk has taken steps to shore up advertiser confidence. Shortly after the billionaire acquired the San Francisco-based company, Twitter tried to win back wary ad customers by rolling out a new product that would let marketers block their ads from appearing alongside tweets that contain certain keywords or images — called adjacency controls.
Last year, Twitter started offering advertisers major discounts – in some cases hundreds of thousands of dollars in free ads – if they would start spending again.
(With Bloomberg inputs)
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First Published:31 Mar 2023, 09:42 AM IST
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