Comment by phphphphp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by phphphphp | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

it’s a nonsense argument, most people (including musk) couldn’t even articulate robust criteria for measuring a “non-human” user — musk himself has undermined his position on this topic multiple times.

Twitter has never claimed that the number is accurate nor important in absolute terms (“we aren’t sure” features prominently in their filings!) rather it’s a number that is important for understanding growth and evolution of the platform. The number matters quarter-to-quarter, not in isolation.

Active human users matters in the context of advertising, it’s a pointless distraction that musk is employing to back out of the deal.

Let’s imagine there is a real measure of “non-human users” and lets say it turns out that Twitter underestimated by 50%… so? Musk long said he wasn’t buying Twitter as a financial move, and that he has a plan to be wildly profitable off of a small proportion of twitter’s users so unless 95% of twitter’s users aren’t real, it doesn’t impact his (absurd and ridiculous) plan.

It matters because Twitter have misled advertisers as to the quality of their audience.

If Twitter did come out and say they underestimated non human activity by 50% or the like then yes Musk should be forced to continue the sale.

Twitter haven't though. They are still pretending that less than 5% of daily active users are non-monetizable.

That’s not how advertising works, advertisers don’t care about “quality of the audience” in the abstract because digital advertising is results driven. There’s a great deal of fraud in advertising across the industry, and it’s certainly not good, but it’s a cost of doing business for advertisers and is factored in: when an advertiser pays Twitter $100 to generate $150 in revenue, it doesn’t matter if $50 of that $100 was spent because it “non-human users”. Twitter could reveal tomorrow “oops our numbers are wrong, our non-human user count is actually twice as high” and it would have zero impact on advertisers. Not a single professional in the space would care, because advertisers are not measuring their value from Twitter based on twitters KPIs. Advertising is a means to an end, advertisers measure the end.

That's completely false. I've worked in both the media buying and inventory side of advertising and the large accounts definitely care about the quality of audience. Nike, Apple, Nestle etc have huge internal agencies that are tasked with finding brand safe platforms to advertise against.

The type of attribution based advertising you are talking about certainly also exists whereby the advertiser pays $x per (milli)impression, then a further $x for click-thru and then a final $x for a conversion. However the vast majority of twitter's revenue is in the first bucket (CPM) which is entirely valued based on the size and quality of the audience.

You’re drawing an arbitrary line. The majority of digital advertisers are using digital advertising because the value is quantifiable through attributable revenue.

There are certainly a minority of major brands that operate as advertisers with awareness campaigns — sponsored hashtags are a good example — but if you read the Twitter filings, it’s very clear that their focus is performance based advertising — and that’s where they see their future, too.

Maybe a decade ago you could have said that advertisers were just trusting platforms to deliver value, and that ad-fraud could make or break a platform if they got caught, but that’s not true anymore, it’s a much more sophisticated market. Advertisers aren’t (as) dumb (as they once were).

Brand safety is a whole other kettle of fish — that’s a concern across all types of advertising, and not relevant to the audience, rather the content of the platform.

>You’re drawing an arbitrary line. The majority of digital advertisers are using digital advertising because the value is quantifiable through attributable revenue.

If you are talking about the majority of ad impressions being programmatic/attribution based then yes you are correct, however if you talking about dollars spent that direct sponsorship with large internal agencies is still very much king.

To give some context, large corps would routinely drop $5 million on a direct deal with Twitter for a combination of promoted tweets, hashtags, trending etc. This was also almost pure margin as there was no middle DSP/SSP taking a cut. To get the same profit from the method you are purporting to be most common would take years.

>Maybe a decade ago you could have said that advertisers were just trusting platforms to deliver value, and that ad-fraud could make or break a platform if they got caught, but that’s not true anymore, it’s a much more sophisticated market. Advertisers aren’t (as) dumb (as they once were).

Maybe a decade ago? So the people who are now in senior positions at the agency and call all the shots are the ones making the major deals. Well then it would stand to reason that the biggest profit comes from deals that are structured like they were 10 years ago.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com