ExTwitter Ad Revenue Continues To Be In Free Fall

Last week, exTwitter’s CEO-in-name-only Linda Yaccarino gave what is the cringiest interviews I’ve ever seen at the Code Conference. Multiple people told me they couldn’t watch more than a few minutes of it. It’s so bad. She is barely listening, extremely dismissive of important questions, and acting as if people are lucky to hear her. It’s awful.

It’s also embarrassing. Her whole thing is that she’s supposed to be the adult in the room, and it was clear that she was wholly unprepared for a series of fairly basic questions that anyone in her position had to know were going to be asked. She deflected, she acted cagey, she went off on weird tangents, and seemed almost entirely unaware of her audience.

Anyway, at one point in discussing the fact that ad revenue on the platform has collapsed, she suggested that advertisers were coming back. She said that reports of about 60% of ad revenue going away were “months and months old information,” and that “90% of the top 100 advertisers have returned to the platform.” That’s… weird in its own way. If you’re talking about 100 advertisers, you can just say “90 of the top 100.” You don’t need to say percent. It’s the same.

Then she claimed “in the last 12 weeks alone, about 1500 have returned.”

So, anyway, the “months and months old information” came directly from Elon Musk himself literally a month ago in (falsely) blaming the ADL.

That’s September 4th. Yaccarino’s interview was September 27th. That’s not “months and months old information.”

And, now there’s more data confirming it. Ad analytics company Guideline shared data with Reuters showing not just that ad revenue has dropped, but that it has been pretty consistently down ever since Musk took over.

Oof?

I mean, you can argue that after December and January things got… better? Slightly? But, basically, they start dropping again every time Elon embraces some fringe crackpot, and raises up bigotry. See how things were getting slightly better in February before dropping in March? At the end of February was when Elon supported Dilbert creator Scott Adams’ ignorant racist tirade.

Then things started trending slightly upwards (though still way down from last year) in April and May before dropping drastically in June and July. In May was when Elon went after George Soros, using antisemitic tropes.

It’s almost as if (as we’ve noted) advertisers directly view Elon Musk himself as a liability. Given that Musk has continued to embrace more ignorant bigotry in September, I imagine that there may be another downturn, no matter what Yaccarino says.

And, again, literally all of this was avoidable. Elon could have kept revenue on the platform effectively constant, just by… not being an ignorant bigot and not supporting other ignorant bigots. It’s not difficult.

Meanwhile, Yaccarino has to take these terrible numbers and convince the banks who lent Elon $13 billion of the $44 billion he needed that their investment is still good, even though Elon himself has admitted the value has cratered by at least 50% and newer estimates say the real valuation may be closer to $8 billion. When a news organization as vanilla as Reuters is now running headlines saying “Elon Musk’s X is a black hole of value,” and has a credible explanation of how the company might be lucky to have a valuation of $8 billion, people have to start to realize what a colossal fuckup this whole thing has been, entirely because Elon literally has no one around him he can listen to that will tell him he has no clue what he’s doing and just keeps making everything worse.