Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Author | Sun Pengyue

Editor | Gale

It has been more than three months since Musk acquired Twitter for $44 billion on October 27 last year. In more than 100 days, Twitter has undergone earth-shaking changes.

First, after delisting from the New York Stock Exchange, Twitter completely changed from a public company to a Musk private company, followed by the collective resignation of the executive team led by CEO Palag Agrawal. Finally, Musk raised a butcher's knife to ordinary employees, from more than 7000 employees laid off to 2300.

Chaos, twists and turns, turbulence, became the first impression of "Ma's" Twitter, Musk's failure on Twitter made users across the network question his reputation as a genius.

At the end of 2022, Musk launched a vote on Twitter on "whether I should resign as head of Twitter" and said he would abide by the results. In the end, nearly 10 million netizens voted in favor, and 57.5% of the voters wanted him to "step down."

Musk, Twitter.

Musk finally tweeted: "as soon as I find someone stupid enough to take the job, I will immediately resign as CEO. After that, I will only be in charge of the software and server team."

Musk also seems at a loss about Twitter's chaotic status quo. Once ambitious plans for Twitter to overtake Wechat, it has become a "job that only a fool would take over".

Why did advertisers abandon Twitter? why did Twitter collapse? The biggest reason is that it has been collectively abandoned by advertisers.

After Musk bought Twitter, the first step in the reform of Twitter content was to relax the content censorship policy, dissolve the "trust and security committee" and remove the accounts of a group of extremists (except for journalists who have long published adverse remarks against Musk. And bloggers who track Musk's aircraft.

Among the Twitter employees who have been laid off by more than half are a large number of staff responsible for content review and 40 advertising team engineers.

Meanwhile, Twitter launched a new policy on December 18 last year in an attempt to "disconnect" from competing platforms and prohibit users from "promoting" social media accounts such as Facebook, Instagram and Mastodon on Twitter.

In the chaos of Twitter, a large number of stars, big Vs and online celebrities announced their withdrawal from Twitter, and advertisers fled one after another.

According to the Media Matters report, half of Twitter's top 100 advertisers have been lost. There are many big brands, such as Apple, Coca-Cola, Carlsberg, Dell, Chanel, Volkswagen, General Moz, AMC, Ford, Nestl é and so on. Some of these advertisers have chosen to publicly announce that they will stop advertising on Twitter, while others have chosen to withdraw quietly.

Before Musk's acquisition, the average number of Twitter advertisers was 3900. In Musk's era, the lowest number of advertisers had fallen to about 2300.

Source: the biggest reason for online advertisers to abandon Twitter is that Musk's relaxation of Twitter censorship has led to a sharp rise in racist and hate tweets on the Twitter platform. A large number of content risks have caused advertisers to worry that continuing to advertise on Twitter will affect their brand image.

According to media revelations: Twitter expects to lose more than 30 million users in the next two years; Twitter's daily revenue is 40% lower than the same period last year; Q4 revenue in 2022 fell 35%, or about $1.025 billion; and the reason for the decline is Twitter's core advertising business.

In an effort to redeem advertisers, Musk continued to broaden the scope of political ads allowed, and Twitter banned most of them in 2019.

Under Musk's leadership, Twitter's content censorship has been relaxed, racial discrimination and hate tweets have increased, and political advertising has soared, making it a mess.

Twitter authenticates fake accounts, Twitter offers generous incentives to retain advertisers.

Twitter sent an email to advertising agencies across the network saying that it would launch "the largest advertiser incentive in history" and that if the amount of brand advertising spending reached a certain level, it would get additional display opportunities.

Customers who spend at least $500000 on advertising will be eligible for a value-added reward equal to the amount spent, up to $1 million; customers who spend $350000 will get a 50 per cent increase; customers who spend $200000 will get a 25 per cent increase; for overseas countries such as Japan and the UK, value-added incentives will even double.

Musk also loosened restrictions on users signing up for new accounts, hoping to stimulate advertisers with a surge in user data. According to Musk, the average number of daily registered users of Twitter reached an all-time high of 2 million, up 66 per cent from the same period last year. The number of active users has also reached an all-time high; within 2-18 months, Twitter will have more than 1 billion monthly users.

In addition to the value-added reward for advertising, Musk posted "Twitter Blue" on Twitter, a paid authentication and subscription service for Blue V users, in an attempt to develop Twitter's second core revenue growth line and get rid of its dependence on advertising.

It is understood that Twitter Blue is similar to China's Weibo's "Big V Certification" and is available to all kinds of public figures with a monthly subscription price of $8 for the web version and $11 for Apple devices.

While Musk's starting point was to rid Twitter of its dependence on advertisers, the trust and security team within Twitter so disapproved of Twitter Blue that it even marked it as "P0" as the highest risk, listing a seven-page document detailing the cyber dangers associated with Twitter Blue.

But Musk refused to take any negative advice.

On November 5, 2022, Twitter Blue was officially launched, and just a few days later, a large number of fake authentication accounts flooded Twitter, and the platforms were all fake Blue V authentication accounts. Even Nintendo, a well-known Japanese game company, was impersonated by a private user and posted a picture of Mario's middle finger, which hung on the platform for more than a day, which had a great negative impact on Nintendo.

A few days later, Musk removed the Twitter Blue function, and Joel Ross, the head of the trust and security team, resigned angrily.

When the plan to save Twitter failed, Musk chose to make up for his losses with layoffs. At the end of November, Musk emailed an ultimatum to the remaining 2900 employees: in order to develop Twitter 2.0, staff needed to be "very hard-core" and had a resume of "long and intense" work, and now only outstanding performance was considered a pass.

And Musk requires employees to sign a commitment to abide by the new standards. At the same time, employees who are laid off because of disqualification must sign up to waive the right to sue Twitter, or do not make negative comments about Twitter or Musk for the rest of their lives.

At present, more than 500 of the half of the employees laid off on Twitter are suing for redundancy compensation.

Tesla takes the blame for Twitter when the so-called Twitter 2.0 is just a chicken feather, users naturally choose other social platforms. Among them, the one who gets the most bonus is Mastodon.

In the two weeks after Musk's acquisition of Twitter, Mastodon's downloads in the US soared more than 100-fold to 320,000, while global downloads climbed to 1 million, a staggering 657 per cent, according to Sensor Tower.

Meanwhile, Alphonzo Phonz Terrell, the former global head of social networking and editing on Twitter, who was fired by Musk, launched a new social platform, Spill, which provides a more free and equal voice environment for blacks, LGBT and other minorities, as well as overseas creators. Since the project was announced in mid-December last year, Spill has received 60000 registration intention.

With the massive loss of users and the emergence of "Twitter substitutes", Twitter is facing shock.

Musk before Mastodon has always had the title of "Silicon Valley Iron Man" and the future science and technology leader of mankind. But after the baptism of Twitter, the people Musk has been defending finally collapsed, and the face of the capitalists was undoubtedly revealed.

Why would Musk use a very radical reform Twitter that leaves no room for reform? The reason is that his pressure is amazing enough.

In order to successfully complete the acquisition of Twitter, Musk was saddled with interest on $13 billion of debt. At the same time, because of Twitter "blood transfusion", Musk sold Tesla shares several times in a row. According to statistics, Musk sold about $23 billion of Tesla shares.

Cut Tesla's flesh and feed it to Twitter. Mr Musk's move immediately dealt a heavy blow to Tesla, with Tesla's share price falling 59 per cent.

Tesla's shareholders said that Musk is no longer suitable to serve as Tesla's CEO, Tesla needs a "full-time CEO."

On one side, Twitter is mired in a quagmire and continues to bleed; on the other hand, there is a fire in the backyard and Tesla shareholders protest. Musk stepped down from the altar and the myth of creating wealth gradually turned into a bubble.

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: zinc Finance (ID:xincaijing), author: sun Pengyue

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