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Comment by dragontamer | Hacker News Reader

But not the features that retain advertisers. Which were the silent issues that no one talked about before.

And indeed, advertisers aren't talking about it now. They're just leaving the platform in droves. There's no one _to_ talk about it with. Entire teams (including high ranking executives) that kept relationships with advertisers have been fired.

Twitter doesn't even have anyone answering / categorizing the complaints anymore.

> Don't think Twitter's revenue issues have anything to do with sales staff. Advertising channels/campaigns can and should be 100% automated.

You can't automate news. News is constantly changing. Advertisers _constantly_ are complaining about "X is being shown next to Y news event. Please stop that", and its impossible to predict X, or Y.

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> Advertisers _constantly_ are complaining about "X is being shown next to Y news event. Please stop that", and its impossible to predict X, or Y.

It would be interesting to have a UI that lets them say that they don't want to be next to X, or they do want to be next to Y, and they pay different prices to appear next to more/less popular things.

This is table stakes for ad platforms. You still also need to be reactive to new events.

Why not use the same tools?

Internally they probably are, it's just a question of whether the advertiser or agency or platform is pushing the buttons. For obvious reasons the platform owner can usually push them fastest, and can earn more money for doing so, so why shouldn't they do it?

Advertisers dropped spending because they don't like Elon/his behavior. Not because sales staff were laid off. It's quite obvious to anybody looking at the situation objectively.

Twitter has functioned fine after massive layoffs, and feature velocity has only accelerated. Too many developers have an inflated sense of self importance

> Not because sales staff were laid off.

There's plenty of advertisers who have blogged about "My emails to Twitter stopped getting answered" around the time of the 75% layoffs. This is well documented.

What do you want the advertisers to do? To just keep giving money to Twitter even when all their contacts have disappeared? There's some pretty basic behaviors that have nothing to do with politics here that Twitter is failing at.

If I were an advertiser (and I have in the past), I would look at the metrics of engagement for my ads to assess their efficacy, not talk to a representative. Either you're happy with the revenue lift or you're not.

To say that ad sales has to be a manual, high touch channel is simply wrong. Perhaps you have staff on hand for large accounts, but why would e-commerce drop shipping headphone company #7 need to talk to a human?

I'm talking about the $100+ Million advertisers, not small ones like you.

Disney is most interested in making sure that Mickey Mouse / Winnie the Pooh / Zootopia is not accidentally shown next to furry porn. Southwest doesn't want its ads shown next to airplane disasters. Kellogs doesn't want "Itsssss GREAT" being shown next to the Ukrainian War.

As I said before: you can't predict the "X is being shown next to Y, please stop that" problem. Its impossible to predict X, its impossible to predict Y. You just gotta have email lines with these big companies and promptly issue your programmers / machine learning / data scientists the new algorithms to keep advertisers happy.

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Twitter is 100% the grounds where furry porn, Airplane Disasters, and Ukrainian War disasters are constantly being discussed and shared. Advertisers want protection of their brand, despite the online discourse.

Twitter didn't have a keyword list to exclude after being in the business for like 20 years? They needed ad buyers to manually contact them and then needed someone to add that with a developer?

IIRC, those tools were in an incomplete state before the takeover... but at least they were somewhat working and Twitter's executives were prompt in responding to any issues. But the APIs have been degenerating rapidly after the takeover.

When the tools aren't working as expected, the advertisers then emailed Twitter's API teams. All of those teams have been dismantled, the executives have been fired. With no one left to contact, the advertisers have begun to leave.

That's wild. Why is ad buying such a mess? Google's setup felt extremely outdated last I had to work with it. Is it just largely ignored because it's assumed that most buyers will work with some agency / platform that will integrate with the API and provide a better UI?

Southwest and Disney continue to advertise on Twitter, so I assume they're satisfied with the tools in place.

> Twitter has functioned fine after massive layoffs, and feature velocity has only accelerated

Feature velocity for users. Not customers. Also, the deprecation of APIs strongly intimates Twitter Blue was a failure.

> Also, the deprecation of APIs

... and has driven away, or may drive away, many of the core content providers for their network effects. People who buy a third party client for twitter are generally not casual users. I reached out to a few friends I would consider 'posters' a couple of journos, a couple of 'personal brand' advertiser types... all of their twitter engagement is way down .. from both sides of the conversation. Two of them are now in a 'mostly I just post now' mode. Having conversations has become to hard. The other two are struggling along but they've had to cut way back, one said 'It was like I was building a house with a nailgun, but it got taken away and someone handed me a rock.'

It took me two days without tweetbot to realize it was was one of the only things that kept me actually using twitter. Finally causing me to mothball my account and throw up a personal mastodon install and start re-finding my personal follows there (I'm at about 50% of my list, but i'm finding that mostly what I'm missing is retweets from a few degrees out). My feed's incoming posts per hour are certainly down from twitter by about 60% but I was honestly expecting much lower numbers.

Why isn’t there a Tweetbot for Mastodon?

Onboarding is a PITA. With Twitter ceding the ground, this could be a real differentiator. Hell, you could build a licensing component paid to the servers.

There is, it's just in beta. It's called Ivory: https://tapbots.com/ivory/

It won't help you, currently or maybe ever, pick a server, but it's a great client even in it's beta form.

> Advertisers dropped spending because they don't like Elon/his behavior.

I mean, yeah? If someone fired all my contacts at a company and didn’t return my emails as my revenue dropped as a result of their changes I would also stop paying them?

Thanks for confirming

Twitter has lost 75% of it's employees, 50% of it's revenue and gained 25% more debt.

It's gone from a break even company to financial ruination.

Twitter is shutting down data centers and offices. Elon Musk has single handedly collapsed the company.

Twitter will shortly be either bankrupt or personally funded by Elon Musk's bank balance by the end of the year.

He overpaid massively for the company, yes. That was a critical mistake and why its now encumbered with debt.

It seems like playing chicken with "Don't make me pay this hugely overinflated price I promised or I'll crash the company." as your strategy maybe wasn't such a smart idea. Now he's out the money and has literally nothing to show for it. Meanwhile his other ego stock, which he somehow had manipulated into a wild overvaluation, is now crashing because everyone can plainly see that he's just kinda a dumb motherfucker.

And Twitter needs advertisers more than advertisers need Twitter. Maybe there are exceptions but I can't imagine Twitter is this uniquely wonderful channel for the vast bulk of advertisers.

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