Twitter has suffered a “massive decline in revenue” due to advertisers stopping spending on the social media platform, Elon Musk, the company’s new owner, said on Friday, without providing numbers.
In a tweet, the CEO of Tesla, Twitter and SpaceX laid the blame on “activist groups pressuring advertisers”. He said Twitter has not changed its content moderation strategy and added that the company has done “everything we can to appease activists.”
Musk did not specify how much revenue the company lost from the withdrawal, or how he was able to attribute that loss to pressure from activist groups.
Musk reiterated his views on Friday in an interview at the Baron Investment Conference.
“We haven’t made any changes to our operations,” Musk said at the event. “And we’ve done our best to appease them and nothing’s working. So that’s a big concern. And I think that’s frankly an attack on the First Amendment.”
Twitter has laid off or laid off roughly 50% of its employees since he took office on October 28.
In recent days, a number of companies said they would do so temporarily halt their ad spending on Twitter to see how things would change there under Musk’s ownership. Tesla the competitors General Motors and Audi, and food titan General Mills are among the companies that have stopped spending on Twitter.
United Airlines suspended its ads on Twitter earlier this week, a spokesman for the carrier said Friday. The airline is still posting on the platform. It appears to be the first US passenger airline to say it has suspended advertising on Twitter. The airlines separately offer customer service on Twitter, which United is also not suspending, the spokesman said, declining to elaborate further on the decision.
Advertising giant IPG advised clients to temporarily pause their Twitter media plans, although it is unclear how many clients are taking IPG’s agency advice.
Twitter informed employees Thursday evening that it would begin laying off staff members, according to communications obtained by CNBC. Twitter’s content moderation team is expected to be among those job cuts, Reuters reported, citing tweets from employees.
Musk in one I tweet On Friday, he addressed the layoffs, saying, “In terms of reducing Twitter’s power, unfortunately there is no choice when the company is losing over $4 million a day. Everyone who is leaving has been offered 3 months off from work, which is 50% more than required by law.”
CNBC has not confirmed this with former Twitter employees.
CNBC has also learned that deep cuts have been made to Twitter’s global marketing team, which handles, among other things, reporting and metrics around ad performance, sales performance and spam.
Earlier this week Musk, who now calls himself “Chief Twit,” met with a group of civil society organization leaders to address concerns about hate speech and election-related misinformation on the platform.
Since Musk took over, online trolls and bigots have raided Twitter, and hate speech has grown on the platform. Musk also tweeted, then deleted, an unfounded and anti-LGBTQ conspiracy theory about a home invasion and attack on Paul Pelosi, the husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Some of the organizations represented on Tuesday’s hour-long Zoom call have now co-signed an open letter to Twitter’s top advertisers asking them to suspend their ad spending if Musk fails to comply with security standards and guidelines. company community.
Despite Musk’s claims of a recent revenue decline, Twitter’s ad spending had been declining before his takeover of the company was completed and before civil society organizations began pressuring brands, according to the platform. of MediaRadar advertising analytics.
According to data from MediaRadar, Twitter advertisers spiked between April and May, around the time Musk’s plan to take Twitter private was announced, before it began to decline. But the average number of advertisers on the platform fell from 3,900 in May to 2,300 in August. It had 2,900 advertisers in September.
