The problem with writing about Twitter is that everything clever, funny and succinct about Twitter has already been written ... on Twitter. The bird app has long been a self-referential stash of multilayered in-jokes and instantaneous observations more meta than, well, Meta.
It’s a place where users lament their own addiction to Twitter, cringe at or recoil from the Twitter behaviour of others and profess bafflement at the rules of engagement, as set first by “original” Twitter, then by Elon Musk’s Twitter 2.0 — a $44 billion (€41 billion) experiment in personal fiefdom where these rules change almost daily and with an unpredictability that has, by now, become predictable.
Twitter is the only social media platform I can think of where a change in ownership could boost — temporarily —engagement not because of any new function introduced by the new owner, but because people wanted to talk about the acquisition using the acquisition itself. I say talk, I mean either gloat (if you’re part of the Musk cult) or despair (if you’re not).
According to the Axel Springer-owned market research firm, Twitter is in the process of seeing its share of worldwide digital advertising revenues drop to 0.5% this year and then whittle down further to 0.4% in 2024 and 2025
As a result, almost everybody on Twitter will be semi-reluctantly up to date on the latest “hellsite” plot developments, while few people not on Twitter will care.
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But the returns from such niche appeal are now diminishing, squeezing the viability out of a company that was never overly familiar with the concept of a profit anyway. Indeed, each new flare-up of chaos has the bang of a death throe that will bring the company closer to a premature end. That it hasn’t happened already disappoints some people. That doesn’t mean the diagnosis was wrong.
Forecasts published this month by analysts at Insider Intelligence, the New York-based digital economy specialists, put a numerical shape on a trajectory that is obvious to many users: advertisers have gone cold on Twitter.
To be fair, they were rarely more than lukewarm on it. According to the Axel Springer-owned market research firm, Twitter is in the process of seeing its share of worldwide digital advertising revenues drop to 0.5 per cent this year and then whittle down further to 0.4 per cent in 2024 and 2025. From which great height has this market share plummeted? Um, that would be just 0.9 per cent in 2021 and 0.8 per cent in 2022.
Nevertheless, this is more than mere subsidence. Twitter under Musk has jumped off a cliff: Insider Intelligence predicts that its advertising revenues will plunge a catastrophic 27.9 per cent from $4.14 billion last year to $2.98 billion in 2023.
Jasmine Enberg, principal analyst at Insider Intelligence, couldn’t have been clearer in her verdict: “The biggest problem with Twitter’s ad business is that advertisers don’t trust Musk.”
None of Twitter’s efforts to bring back advertisers through ad incentives and brand safety partnerships will work with him at the helm was the blunt assessment, while the spike in usage time prompted by the takeover saga itself has also now dissipated — or as Enberg put it, users have “lost interest” in Musk’s antics.
Perhaps sensing this, Musk has, if anything, ratcheted up his antics in recent weeks.
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The day after Insider Intelligence’s stark forecasts were published, the attention-seeker-in-chief gave an impromptu interview to the BBC in which, among a glut of other claims, he suggested Twitter was “roughly” breaking even — gutting its workforce by 80 per cent will help with that — and that advertisers who left the site last year were “returning”.
Just the month before, Musk had admitted at a conference organised by Morgan Stanley, one of his key bankers, that Twitter ad revenue fell as much as 50 per cent after he got his mitts on the company.
Not exactly supporting the freshly optimistic outlook presented to the BBC, however, is the fact that Microsoft has dumped Twitter off its popular advertising platform — a move apparently implemented in response to new prices set by Musk to access Twitter’s application programming interface.
Meanwhile, reports suggest advertisers spending less than $1,000 each month will be asked to either subscribe to Twitter Blue (the blue badge) or the verified organisation’s scheme (the gold badge) in order to continue advertising on it.
The losing friends and alienating people approach to business has extended far beyond advertisers, of course. This April alone the world’s second-richest man but its undisputed number one troll has managed to rile the following: The New York Times, LeBron James, Substack, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Stephen King, the BBC, National Public Radio, PBS and Lil Nas X.
“U will feel my wrath Tesla man!” the rapper tweeted as he joined the ranks of celebrities distancing themselves from the idea they would shame themselves by paying for Twitter Blue.
Twitter has become unusable for many professional users as well as individual ones. It threatens daily to become undesirable for many more
This week has begun with a new advertiser-related clanger.
At the Morgan Stanley event in March, Musk went out of his way to namecheck and thank Disney and Apple for continuing to spend big on the platform. Alas, it has rewarded Disney for its loyalty to the platform by inadvertently bestowing a gold badge upon a random Disney impersonator.
The @DisneyJuniorUK account, which seemed as surprised as anyone by Twitter’s incompetence, was only suspended on Monday after it had time to make a racial slur against Musk, declare adult comedy South Park was coming to Disney Junior next month and use the word f*** in a distinctly un-Disney-like fashion.
Such sideshows are symptomatic of the main meltdown: Twitter has become unusable for many professional users as well as individual ones. It threatens daily to become undesirable for many more.
Ironically, as long as the platform is itself a story, journalists will hang about on it, even if their employers’ brands slip away one by one. That’s because to be on Twitter in 2023 is to be a witness to the most bizarre of self-inflicted business implosions. It is an extraordinary circus, an accelerated destruction of one man’s wealth and a social media endgame all in one.
