Digital Advertising, Twitter and How Elon is Shaking it Up By: Beau Crawford
How Billionaire Elon Musk Is Changing Social Media
Since Elon’s takeover of Twitter back in October of last year, users of the platform have gotten used to frequent and quickly implemented changes to the Twitter UI. This includes the addition of view counts to tweets, the ability to pay for a Twitter verification and retroactively overturning permabans for high profile figures that were previously excised from the website. After fallout from Twitter’s top paying advertisers due to hate speech and conspiracy theories spreading on the platform, revenue for the social media company is seemingly taking another plunge post-Musk takeover. Continuing in this advertiser-free direction, Elon expressed that the advertisements on the website’s feed are too large and frequent, something he is looking to change within the upcoming weeks.
Elon is seemingly digging a deeper hole for himself in terms of generating revenue for the company by admitting to future clients that their ads on Twitter will be smaller and less frequent. In addition, Elon explains that he will further expand Twitter Blue subscription service to add an additional “higher priced subscription” that would make Twitter an ad-free experience. This decision is coming after previous changes to Twitter Blue made by Elon in November of last year, removing the ad-free article feature of Twitter Blue and allowing Twitter Blue subscribers to see 50% less ads.
If you recognize a pattern in Elon’s actions as CEO thus far, it is clear he’s trying to make Twitter less dependent on the traditional social media advertisement model as its main source of revenue. Rather, he is heavily emphasizing a subscription based model like Netflix, Amazon or Spotify. In theory, creating a strong and lucrative subscription base allows the company to not have to rely on big advertisers to pay the bills. But, more importantly for Elon, this change would release the hold advertisers have on content moderation preferences. Twitter is now a private company after the Musk acquisition, so retail investors are not at Elon’s throat. The only people truly losing are the former Twitter employees who lost their job and Elon’s private investment group.
Now, why does it matter? During the pre-Musk Twitter era, monetization of the platform was already an issue that kept Twitter from being truly profitable. So telling potential customers of Twitter ad space that their ads are going to be smaller, less frequent and in some cases not viewable at all, seems like a bad idea all together. Twitter itself is already an insular bubble, with an active user base that dwarfs Facebook. So when companies and agencies are looking to spend their ad dollars for a campaign, it seems as if Twitter is becoming a losing proposition for digital marketers. Unless future changes are made to the UI to allow advertisements to be delivered in a new, effective way, Twitter does not seem to be the most viable tool to get advertisements in front of as many eyes as possible. However, when it comes to organic marketing strategies, generating exposure naturally without using paid platform integrated ads is beneficial. Twitter still has an amazing ability to impact audiences due to the culture of memes and virality on the website.
