Twitter’s US ad sales are down by 59 per cent year-on-year, according to the company’s internal reporting. What’s more, it is regularly missing its US weekly sales projections.
That Twitter has been losing ad sales is nothing new. An exodus of advertisers started as soon as Elon Musk acquired the company from founder Jack Dorsey.
However, these internal sales projections, seen by The New York Times, suggest that the social media site is performing worse than Musk admitted in March – he claimed a 50 per cent drop in ad sales – and hiring NBCUniversal advertising and partnerships boss Linda Yaccarino as the company’s new CEO.
Musk had also claimed in April that advertisers were returning to Twitter and that his efforts to preserve “free speech” on the platform were not a deterrent to ad dollars. Clearly, that isn’t the case.
Even third-party web analysts Similarweb have found that the overall traffic to Twitter’s online ads portal was down by 18.7 per cent year-over-year in April.
Advertisers have reportedly been perturbed by more of Musk’s antics on Twitter.
Musk promised that Twitter would show an exclusive premiere of What is a Woman? a documentary created by noted right-wing transphobe and self-proclaimed “theocratic fascist.” However, after reviewing the contents of the film, Twitter’s trust and safety execs chose to back away from the deal, due to concerns that it could be viewed as hate speech based, specifically, on its content around misgendering.
But Musk decided that he would step over the top of the team and show the film anyway. Ella Irwin, Twitter’s VP of Trust and Safety, and another high-profile member of the team stepped down. Irwin had only been with the company for a year and took over the trust and safety team following the departure of Yoel Roth, who also decided he could not work with Musk.
