Now, Reuters is reporting that the ad revenue decline may be even worse that reported earlier. Apparently ad spending in December (typically a pretty big advertising month) was down an absolutely jaw dropping 71%.
And, the numbers may actually be even worse when you look at the details. An Axios article from a couple weeks ago did note that “dozens of media companies” are still doing content advertising deals with Twitter, mainly around sporting events. Elon even tweeted out the story in an effort to show that things are supposedly going great with Twitter advertising. Except there was an important detail buried in the article:
Most of these media partnerships are multiyear deals and were brokered before Musk took over Twitter.
Twitter has not yet shared how much its new “paid basic tier” will cost, and the company has only vaguely promised “more details on what you can expect next week.” Thousands of small developers may have to shut down free tools like @ThreadReaderApp or @RemindMe_ofThis, the Verge reported, impacting hundreds of thousands of followers who rely on small developers to build tools that help maximize their engagement with the platform.
Forbes called Twitter’s decision to remove free access a “cash grab” that will make Twitter a less enjoyable space, with the potential loss of fun bots like @FoxesEveryHour, which just tweets photos of foxes. That bot tweeted to confirm that it will stop operating on February 9, saying, “I don’t earn anything with this bot so I can’t afford to pay, sorry. I will try to find a solution/alternative to this.”
Twitter’s paid basic tier is likely targeting bigger developers accessing the Twitter API to support commercial projects. Those developers will need to evaluate whether the cost—whatever it ends up being—is justified to continue running services.
Meanwhile, users like reporter Alex Goldman have already begun mourning the impending loss of beloved bots, including bots that tweet everything from Boggle games to randomly generated ASCII night skies.
Allow me to sound like a broken record for a moment:
None of these applications (formerly) using the Twitter API should be impossible to implement on Mastodon, as far as I know. Simple bots that post content could probably even be made as relatively simple containers that share (open source) code.
It’s a chicken-and-egg problem, though. The apps are posting to Twitter because that’s where the users are, and some subset of the users are continuing to use Twitter because that’s where the apps are.
Musk is certainly doing his level best to make the question of which comes first irrelevant.
This may impact sites using Twitter’s oAuth service to allow user logon, because it requires Twitter Developer API access in order to generate Twitter oAuth API keys. Among sites impacted: BoingBoing BBS, Gizmodo Network, and of course, Elsewhere.Cafe.
If you currently use Twitter account to log into Elsewhere, please notify us so we can migrate you to an email-address authentication.
Effective next week, Apartheid Clyde is cutting off general Twitter API.
I remember back when I was going to school - this was '12/'13, my last semester - and I asked via FB if I should bother signing up for Twitter. One of my classmates, much younger than I, told me no, it wasn’t worth it.
The new pricing for gold check-mark status falls under the new Twitter Blue for Business service, which is “a new way for businesses and their affiliates to verify and distinguish themselves on Twitter,” the company announced in December. Under their primary account, Twitter Blue for Business customers are able to link affiliated individuals, businesses, brands — and even “movie characters” — which will get a small badge of their parent company’s profile picture next to their own blue or gold check-mark. Twitter also introduced new square profile pictures for companies and brands, and it has applied gray check-marks to governmental accounts.
Musk has said that within the next few months, Twitter will discontinue all legacy verified check-marks, so that eventually only paying individual and corporate customers will have verified status. “The way in which [verified check-marks] were given out was corrupt and nonsensical,” he tweeted Dec. 12.
$12k a year just for a little icon on your company’s tweets? Plus another 1.2k for each sub-account?
I’d say this is similar to how SSL cert providers work, but at least they provide some value beyond just having a little icon on the browser… and their prices are quite a bit below that highway robbery.
The meeting took place on Tuesday, according to the tech newsletter Platformer. Bringing together engineers and advisers, Musk asked his team why his account, which has “more than 100 million followers,” would only be getting “tens of thousands of impressions.”
A principal engineer stepped forward to explain that the decline may be due to easily chartable waning public interest in Musk. To back up the engineer, Twitter employees provided internal data that corresponded with a Google Trends chart, Platformer reported.
In a recent tweet, Musk accidentally revealed that his behaviour on the platform was so bad, that enough people blocked him, that Twitter automatically classified his account as a nuisance, and so, did not allow his tweets to reach the third tier of distribution (above For You, Your Friends Interacted With). Very funny stuff.
My daughter was saying that she has seen online conversations that at Tesla there is a whole team of people whose job it is to wrangle Elon and lacking this infrastructure at Twitter, he has been allowed to make actual decisions.
Additionally, Elon Musk “flew his private jet back to the Bay Area on Sunday night to demand answers from his team.”
Biden’s tweet supporting the Philadelphia Eagles has 29.1 million views, while Musk’s now-deleted tweet also supporting the Eagles received a mere 9.1 million. Hours after the Eagles’ loss, Musk’s cousin James Musk posted a message in Twitter’s Slack asking anyone “who can make dashboards and write software” to help with “debugging an issue with engagement across the platform,” the report said. James Musk’s Slack message reportedly called the situation one of “high urgency.”
To boost Musk’s tweet views after the Super Bowl, Twitter engineers “deployed code to automatically ‘greenlight’ all of Musk’s tweets, meaning his tweets will bypass Twitter’s filters designed to show people the best content possible. The algorithm now artificially boosted Musk’s tweets by a factor of 1,000—a constant score that ensured his tweets rank higher than anyone else’s in the feed,” Platformer wrote.
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