Experts in social media and advertising say an advertiser exodus has left X reliant on smaller, less reputable ad buyers.
  • X users are complaining about an influx of low-quality ads promoting crypto scams and AI “undressing” apps.
  • The decline in reputable advertisers on X has made the platform more reliant on less reputable ad buyers.
  • The exodus of advertisers, partially due to Elon Musk’s controversial behavior, has left X with a growing revenue gap.

Archive link: https://archive.ph/sbOxS

  • gullible@kbin.social
    1672·
    10 months ago

    You advertise to your audience. Ads targeting the perverse and the stupid seem perfectly suited to twitter.

    • Nobody@lemmy.worldEnglish
      624·
      10 months ago

      You may not like it, but this is what peak advertising looks like. Add in some T-shirts with swastikas on them, and they’ve nailed their target demographic.

    • meco03211@lemmy.worldEnglish
      24·
      10 months ago

      I’ve clicked a few “sources” from a dude I know on Facebook that constantly posts his crazy bullshit. Dick pill ads for days.

      • jopepa@lemmy.worldEnglish
        101·
        10 months ago

        Meanwhile my Hulu ads are for Hers or Hims, I guess my VPN works

            • nomous@lemmy.worldEnglish
              3·
              9 months ago

              I recently got a fresh Hulu acct and it’s funny watching them try to figure out what I “am” while they just cycle through the dating app ads.

              One commercial will be a christian dating app, the next will be a black dating app, the next will be a latino dating app, the next a farmers dating app. It’s hilarious and I’m not exaggerating at all. I’m sure if I started interacting with anything they’d start narrowing my demographics down but for now the algorithm seems to be trying a shotgun approach and it’s a little bit amusing.

    • BlackSkinnedJew@lemmynsfw.comEnglish
      4·
      9 months ago

      I wouldn’t be surprised if the far right wing christofascists start seeing CP AI generators adverts suddenly, it would fit their preferences so well.

  • dejected_warp_core@lemmy.worldEnglish
    98·
    9 months ago

    I’m calling it now. Even if his aim was to not destroy Twitter from the inside, he will absolutely say that was his goal when it eventually happens.

    People like this never, pathologically, ever, ever admit making a mistake.

    • CobblerScholar@lemmy.worldEnglish
      35·
      9 months ago

      He has too much money to give a shit, he lost more money than anyone has literally ever on this deal and he still has more money than almost anyone who’s ever lived. Only way he stops being like this is if he drops dead from the inevitable overdose he’s queuing up for himself

      • SpaceCowboy@lemmy.caEnglish
        151·
        9 months ago

        Eh most of that “money” is actually leveraged Tesla shares. Tesla shares that are overvalued. If he runs Tesla into the ground it’s not actually implausible he goes bankrupt.

        Of course for the billionaires “going bankrupt” isn’t the same as it is for you an me. He’ll still live a life of luxury we can’t even imagine, he just won’t control as much of the economy as he does now. And he can always scam his true believers out of some money by creating a startup promising to to build robot dolphins or whatever (it doesn’t matter he’s a hype man) which he’ll never deliver and idiots will throw money at him.

    • CileTheSane@lemmy.caEnglish
      15·
      9 months ago

      Even if his aim was to not destroy Twitter from the inside, he will absolutely say that was his goal when it eventually happens.

      Could that open him up to lawsuits from investors?

          • andros_rex@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            9 months ago

            Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Larry Ellison (Oracle) were the biggest backers in the buy out deal. Saudi Arabia’s princes want to keep a tight control on information - remember how they butchered Khashoggi? With Qatar it was probably to prevent any slave labor deaths associated with FIFA from going viral. Larry Ellison probably just wanted all that juicy data, idk, he’s quiet but he gives a lot of money to right wing American causes.

        • Mikina@programming.devEnglish
          21·
          9 months ago

          I though Twitter is publicly traded and has stocks? That would mean that he definitely has a duty towards investors who bought the shares to lead the company in a responsible way, and if he claimed that he destroyed it on purpose, it should lead to a lawsuit from them. But I ain’t no lawyer, only vaguely remember hearing something like that. Or does he own 100% of the shares himself and is the sole investor?

          • efstajas@lemmy.worldEnglish
            6·
            9 months ago

            It used to be publicly traded, but it went private when he acquired it.

            Which doesn’t mean he doesn’t answer to any investors anymore, of course. He got quite a lot of assistance with that acquisition.

            • Mikina@programming.devEnglish
              1·
              9 months ago

              Oh, I see. I guess that means there’s basically no-one who can sue him, if there aren’t any investors.

              As long as he can repay any loans and stuff, then I suppose he can do whatever he wants with the company. If, however, he bancrupts it to the point of not being able to pay back anything the company owes, then he should be in trouble. I hope.

  • Max_Power@feddit.deEnglish
    981·
    9 months ago

    Well he told advertisers to fuck off so they did.

    To me as an average Joe it seems pretty dumb to tell your advertisers to fuck off when they provide a big chunk of your income but hey, I’m not a stable genius billionaire so I just don’t get Elon’s 5D chess moves. Right?

  • zeppo@lemmy.worldEnglish
    78·
    10 months ago

    Weird, this week they’re also claiming that TwitX has 24 times the engaged users of YouTube.

    • dinckel@lemmy.worldEnglish
      54·
      10 months ago

      Prime example of “source? trust me bro”. Elon can make up whatever metrics he needs to, but it doesn’t make the platform any better

      • zeppo@lemmy.worldEnglish
        20·
        10 months ago

        Advertisers surely know he’s full of crap, too. He can make up fake views, he could even have bots click on ads, but unless he’s also going to fake being a customer it will all come out in metrics. Savvy advertisers track all of that. Clicks per display, sales per click.

    • garretble@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      9 months ago

      I’m curious about what their definition of “engaged” is. I imagine most people don’t make comments on YouTube videos, but twitter’s main focus has always been posting and commenting on others’ posts.

    • nomous@lemmy.worldEnglish
      8·
      9 months ago

      It’s crazy, any time I open it up I see blatantly obvious rightwing trolls or even gore. My feed pre-Elon didn’t look like that, I mostly followed infosec people but they’ve all gone elsewhere and now it seems I’m being served content that baits me into arguing or converts me.

      • dustyData@lemmy.worldEnglish
        24·
        9 months ago

        They never hurt you.

        This heavily depends from which geographical region you’re from. They were the champions of imperialist colonialism for a loooooong time.

        • Buddahriffic@lemmy.worldEnglish
          11·
          9 months ago

          Hell, I’d broaden it to the whole world because the Romans popularized Christianity, which pretty much immediately kicked off millennia of religious conflict. Christians vs “pagans” (which wasn’t one single group), Christians vs Christians, Christians vs Jews, Christians vs Muslims, Christians vs all “pagans” in the world (and their history), Catholics vs Protestants, church vs science…

          Maybe Christianity would have risen without the Romans, but it wouldn’t have had such a powerful papacy without the Roman legacy. And as much as I hate religion, I have to admit it wasn’t all bad; if it weren’t for the clergy, even more Roman knowledge would have been lost and education in general through Europe would have been worse. Maybe. Islam did have Christianity beat for education and progression for a while, and the church did have a habit of condemning science that contradicted the idea that we were special in every single way.

          • harry_balzac@lemmy.worldEnglish
            10·
            9 months ago

            People who seek power and authority will use whatever tools at their disposal. Christianity is a good tool because it is inherently monotheistic (leaving all the Trinitarian nonsense aside), thus making it authoritarian. One God. One mouthpiece. Christianity would have become dominant somewhere else and infected the world.

            • Buddahriffic@lemmy.worldEnglish
              3·
              9 months ago

              I don’t disagree, I just don’t think there would have been as strong of a central church authority because it wasn’t grandfathered in as a former Roman institution with all the power and influence that came along with that.

              Once the Roman emperors decided Rome was Christian, a lot of Europe was suddenly Christian. Iberia, everything west of the Rhine, the Balkans, Anatolia, and the western part of the Middle East. If Rome hadn’t forced that, Christianity wouldn’t have spread as quickly and might even today still be one of many different sects.

              Islam might have spread through Europe instead of being stopped in Iberia and the Balkans. It’s impossible to know what Europe would have done with Islam, but early Islam was a lot more tolerant of other religions and valued education, knowledge, and progress. We might not have settled in to some centuries of most people thinking humans had discovered everything there was to discover or physics being held back by people offended at the idea that the Earth isn’t the centre of existence. Colonialism might have even been different because Islam didn’t stamp out existing cultures like Christianity did (though again, who knows what it would have evolved into by the time people were figuring out how to navigate the oceans, because Rome also used to be like that).

          • Honytawk@lemmy.zipEnglish
            111·
            9 months ago

            Yes, they did give us that, that’s true

            And sanitation Yes, that too

            The aqueduct I’ll grant is one

            thing the Romans may have done

            And the roads, now they’re all new

            And the great wines too

            Well, apart from the wines and fermentation,

            And the canals for navigation

            Public health for all the nation

            Apart from those, which are a plus,

            what have the Romans ever done for us?

  • Treczoks@lemmy.worldEnglish
    447·
    10 months ago

    Since when do “high quality ads” exist? I mean, the mentioning of “low quality ads” implies that those others might actually exist.

  • SpaceCowboy@lemmy.caEnglish
    371·
    9 months ago

    I’m starting to think that telling your customers to “go fuck themselves” may not be a sound business decision.

  • tigeruppercut@lemmy.zipEnglish
    31·
    9 months ago

    AI undressing apps you say? AI’s about to make that video of Elon telling advertisers to fuck off a lot more surprising.

    • nymwit@lemm.eeEnglish
      2·
      9 months ago

      “Oh, my God, that’s disgusting! Software that makes naked pics online? Where? Where did they post those?”

  • EdibleFriend@lemmy.worldEnglish
    346·
    10 months ago

    I mean…youtube is the same tho. I constantly get ads for apps that are basically flat out saying you can use it to make porn of anyone you want. Not to meniton the constant scams. There is that big one that pops up all the time claiming you can get a online only, no experience necessary, data entry job for Disney starting at something crazy like $25 an hour.

    Musk is shit, X is shit but…all of them allow these kinds of ads.

      • EdibleFriend@lemmy.worldEnglish
        17·
        10 months ago

        Yep, money is too good to be true for a job like that for one thing but I saw someone talk about it and a few others like it. You go through all the steps, give them your personal information, and then you get dumped on a generic job seeking website and then get spammed to death for months.

  • GlendatheGayWitch@lemmy.worldEnglish
    221·
    9 months ago

    We learned in D.A.R.E. that X is bad for you. Seems like X in its digital form is also bad for you and for its dealer.

  • BringMeTheDiscoKing@lemmy.caEnglish
    201·
    10 months ago

    I care just enough to say I don’t care.

    I was repeatedly called a GPT3 bot on Xitter. This was before it was even public.

        • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldEnglish
          6·
          9 months ago

          The best part was, just to see what he would do, I wrote his username and the date and time on a napkin and took a picture of it- blacking out part of my face to limit the doxing- and he claimed it was photoshopped. You can’t win against crazy, but I was pretty amused.

        • Buddahriffic@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          9 months ago

          Hmm last time I tried to do that, all I was able to do was show the selection process that required it was flawed and got admin access anyways.

          Or maybe whoever was in the terminals was just fucking with me the whole time.

          Either way, I’m still not sure I’m a person. Maybe I’m just a meat automation.