Twitter’s valuation has fallen since then. In March, Mr Musk said the company was valued at $20 billion, less than 50 percent of the $44 billion he had paid. Last week, mutual fund giant Fidelity, which owns shares in Twitter, valued the company at $15 billion.
Twitter feels increasingly “unpredictable and chaotic,” said Jason Kint, chief executive of Digital Content Next, an association for premium publishers. “Advertisers want to walk in an environment where they are comfortable and can send signals about their brand,” he said.
Some of Twitter’s biggest advertisers — including Apple, Amazon and Disney — are spending less on the platform than they did last year, three former and current Twitter employees said. He said the large special “banner” ads on Twitter’s trending page, which can cost up to $500,000 for 24 hours and are almost always bought by big brands to promote events, shows or movies, often go blank. .
Twitter is also mired in public relations with big advertisers like Disney. In April, Twitter mistakenly assigned a gold check mark to the @DisneyJuniorUK account — a badge to indicate a paid advertiser that isn’t Disney’s. The account posted racial slurs, leading Disney executives demanded an explanation from Twitter and an assurance that it won’t happen again. people with knowledge of the situation said.
Disney, Apple and Amazon declined to comment.
Six advertising agency executives who have worked with Twitter said their clients continue to limit spending on the platform. They cited concerns about Mr Musk’s change to the service, inconsistent support from Twitter and the frequent presence of misleading and toxic content on the platform.
For example, last month, a photo that appeared to show an explosion near the Pentagon – identified by artificial intelligence experts as an artificially generated image – was shared by dozens of Twitter accounts and briefly caused the stock market to fall,
Some advertisers also remain concerned Mr. Musk’s tweets, Last month he posted multiple times comparing the billionaire financier George Soros, a frequent target for conspiracy theorists for the “X-Men” comic book villain Magneto. Ted Deutch, chief executive officer of the American Jewish Committee, said that both Mr. Soros and Magneto are Holocaust survivors, and that “the liars seek to destroy Jewish civilization, which has led to centuries of persecution of the Jewish people.”
