I half suspect the only reason Twitter had the status it did is because all the news organizations pushed it so hard. Hell, it did all the hard work of finding interesting "new/hot" topics for them to cover. Made their job easier, and it's with the journalists I see a lot of concern and fear over where Twitter is heading.

Of course others used it too, but the 'news cachet' meant a lot too, and helped convince others to use it too. I could easily see journalists fears helping to keep the ugly bastard going. Glad I never wasted my time on it.

Twitter had a team dedicated to working with news organisations to surface their content throughout the app. The leader of that team quit yesterday.

People seem to think Twitter is this almighty power that everyone was begging to work with but actually it's the opposite. Twitter was out there hustling for any relationship they could get.

As advertisers are saying, what Twitter really had going for it wasn't that it was a great place to advertise so much as it was a very engaged ad sales team that leveraged their agency and advertiser relations for all they were worth. Gutting ad sales (and mocking the concept of brand safety) is Musk -- whether he realizes it or not -- burning the advertising bridges behind him and forcing him to commit entirely to this idea of Twitter being a subscription-funded service. Now, Riedy's a long-timer who's held senior positions in both US and EMEA ad sales, so there's what normally would be considered a steady hand at the tiller, but not clear to me if he can keep the ship afloat under such a mercurial owner.

The subscription thing won’t work either.

Discord is the closest thing to a successful subscription only social media business. Compare what Nitro offers to Twitter Blue.

Twitter Blue is like buying the “I am rich” app while Discord Nitro solves actual customer pain points.

Discord has about 10% of their active users paying for Nitro by my calculation based on available information. Twitter getting anywhere close to that level is not likely. Discord has been building their service around paid features for years.

Luckily, Twitter has a large and skilled engineering team capable of quickly rolling out valuable new features to entirely change their business model!

(Sidenote: has anyone ever heard of a generally stable ~10 year IPOed tech company pivoting so drastically? It’s insane)

When on vacation earlier this year I saw ads in a language I don't understand.

Think about that: For 16 years Twitter management was so sclerotic that they were unable to perform basic improvements on targeting ads. Instead their focus was on trendy but money-losing projects like hexagonal profile pics for NFT users.

This is indicative of deep structural problems at Twitter, and won't be tolerated by Elon

When I went on a vacation to another country, I saw an ad for an ISP in the tri-state area 10 times. Friends, I have never been to the tri-state area in my life. I don't live in the US. I have no idea why I saw this.

This is a mobile app! You can get a coarse location, good enough to not show me an ad meant for an area 12000 km away. And yet, Twitter could not manage it.

That ISP wasted money by advertising on Twitter. Eventually other brands will realise this as well.

>They’ll be back if they think their RoI will be better than alternatives.

The RoI will be better than alternatives if Twitter ads are cheap enough. TikTok and possibly YouTube aren't profitable either, but they have inherently higher expenses. If Facebook and Instagram can be profitable, that means that there's a profitable company inside Twitter somewhere. I'm skeptical that Elon can achieve this, but that doesn'tean it's impossible.

>This ignores the fact that Twitter was never a good ads business.

Twitter had >5 billion in ad revenue. Facebook isnt the minimum threshold for good revenue.

It isn't a winner take all system. Meta might get the lions share, but that doesnt mean there is no room for competition.

Costs are adjusted to get similar ROI. Meta might get more clickthrough per add and command a higher price, but Twitter can compete with more adds for the same price, resulting in the same ROI.

Its not zero sum because the user bases aren't the same. If twitter has eyeballs or time that facebook doesn't, they'll get advertisers.

Not if they can’t prove the ROI vs other ad channels. They will just move spend from Twitter to better performing platforms, or even into other marketing or sales activities entirely. For most brands, Twitter isn’t the sole place they can target their audience.