Vox populi, vox Dei, as Elon Musk himself once observed.
As David Strom noted earlier, the cognoscenti in the media have melted down into a “Musky smell” puddle of hysteria. But is that what the rest of America sees in the new direction of the most popular messaging platform?
Musk released new figures this weekend that shows the marketplace likes what it sees in the new Twitter under Musk’s direction. At least one aspect of the marketplace, anyway:
Despite warning of a “massive drop in revenue” due to an advertiser exodus earlier this month, new Twitter owner Elon Musk said Saturday that sign-ups on the platform are at an all-time high.
There were more than two million new sign-ups per day on average in the week that ended Nov. 16, a 66% increase over the same time frame last year, according to slides from a recent company talk that Musk tweeted out on Saturday.
User active minutes were also at an all-time high, while daily active users were closing in on 254 million, Musk said.
“I think I see a path to Twitter exceeding a billion monthly users in 12 to 18 months,” Musk tweeted at author and psychologist Jordan Peterson, who was allowed back on the platform last week after being suspended earlier this year.
Well, both of those are marketplaces. Twitter registration is one aspect of the platform’s market; advertisers are another. The initial success and interest for attracting new users and generating new activity in the media- and activist-driven narratives of failure and apocalypse are notable in themselves, as they offer a popular rebuke to the sneering elites who keep claiming that Twitter has all but died and/or should die. It turns out that a lot of people are at least curious to experience what a social media platform is like without the Academia-fueled cognoscenti in charge. Score one for Musk on that point.
The Washington Post scores it as a win for conservatives, and Republicans in particular:
High-profile Republican members of Congress gained tens of thousands of Twitter followers in the first few weeks of Elon Musk’s reign over the social media network, while their Democratic counterparts experienced a decline, according to an analysis by The Washington Post.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) all lost about 100,000 Twitter followers in the first three weeks of Musk’s ownership of Twitter, while Republican Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.) and Jim Jordan (Ohio) gained more than 300,000 each.
It’s difficult to tell exactly why follower counts go up and down, and the counts are often affected by Twitter banning bot accounts en masse. Not everyone following a specific politician is a supporter.
Still, the pattern suggests that tens of thousands of liberals may be leaving the site while conservatives are joining or becoming more active, shifting the demographics of the site under Musk’s ownership. The changes are in line with a trend that began in April, when Musk announced his intention to buy the company.
Well, that’s a market response, too.
However, moral victories do not a profitable enterprise make. In a perfect world, advertisers would flock to where the crowds are gathered, but we don’t have a clean market dynamic at the moment. Advertisers have backpedaled away from contentious environments over the last several years out of fear of being associated with random eruptions of extreme speech, or better put, speech that activists paint as extreme.
The “if you build it they will come” model of audience-to-advertiser strategy may not apply as well as in earlier days, in other words. At about the same time Musk reported that the consumer market had come to him, leftist activists claimed to have data that showed half of the top 100 advertisers on the platform had either stopped altogether or cut back on their ad buys. The New York Times reported three weeks earlier of advertiser pull-backs, which Musk acknowledged at the time:
The pullback of advertisers from Twitter gathered steam on Friday amid growing fear that misinformation and hate speech would be allowed to proliferate on the platform under Elon Musk’s leadership.
The Volkswagen Group joined several other companies in recommending that its automotive brands, which include Audi, Lamborghini, Bentley and Porsche, pause their spending on Twitter out of concerns that their ads could appear alongside problematic content. The Danish brewing company Carlsberg Group also said it had advised its marketing teams to do the same. The outdoor equipment and apparel retailer REI said it would pause posts in addition to advertising spending “given the uncertain future of Twitter’s ability to moderate harmful content and guarantee brand safety for advertisers.” And a spokeswoman for United Airlines, Leslie Scott, confirmed that the carrier had suspended advertising on Twitter earlier this week.
Even Mr. Musk acknowledged the advertising slump, tweeting on Friday morning that Twitter “has had a massive drop in revenue,” which he blamed on activist groups pressuring advertisers.
Vox Mad Men, vox Dei? Perhaps. While Twitter existed as a publicly held company, it could weather subscriber losses and marginalization even if it meant lower ad rates in the future. After a leveraged buyout, even by the world’s wealthiest man, a big drop in revenue may not be as sustainable. Twitter users normally don’t provide their own revenue as the basic service is free; the only way to monetize this surge is to either charge a subscription or find more advertisers. And that has to be done soon in order to service the debt Musk incurred without having to liquidate his positions in Tesla and other holdings.
Musk wants to do both, of course. This week, Twitter is expected to roll out a new subscriber model after an aborted attempt earlier this month that attempted to combine subscription with verified status. (The new verification system will apparently return to a manual process of some sort.) Presumably subscriptions will eliminate the ad experience, so Musk has to hope that revenue stream will replace it for those users, if not outstrip it. To succeed in leveraging this record user interest, Musk will have to convince advertisers to return.
He’s already building that pitch:
Slides from my Twitter company talk pic.twitter.com/8LLXrwylta
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 27, 2022
Click through the slides to see how Musk frames this for corporate America and Madison Avenue. Will it work? Advertisers may be looking for an excuse to return anyway, with all of the use peaking on Twitter at the moment and a potentially tough Christmas season on the horizon. Advertisers have to go where the people are more than where they want them to be, unless it does more damage to follow than not to follow.
That’s the calculation taking place in the C-suites this week. If Musk is getting more users into Twitter than are leaving — and that’s what this looks like — then Vox populi vox Dei applies. His efforts to assure advertisers that actual threats and hatred can be contained may well be enough for Madison Avenue to dive back into the Twitter pool. It’s already clear that the hysterics don’t speak for the masses in this case, and that should be a very big lesson to advertisers who fret over boycott silliness and woke-campaign threats. Their actual customers don’t bother with those activists … so why should advertisers?
Update: I fixed the headline to change “my buyout” to “Musk buyout.” That worked in an earlier version of the headline, but …
Update: It’s on like Donkey Kong — which you also can’t get in the Apple AppStore:
The world’s richest man has officially declared war on the world’s largest tech company.
Musk accused Apple of censorship and monopolistic practices in a series of tweets, claiming that the company “mostly stopped” advertising on Twitter and questioning whether Apple and its CEO Tim Cook “hate free speech in America.”
“Apple has also threatened to withhold Twitter from its App Store, but won’t tell us why,” Musk tweeted, providing a reason for his recent criticism.
Apple did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment on Musk’s tweets.
It’s not clear whether Apple declared war on Twitter, or Musk declared war on Apple. Did Apple quietly threaten Musk with banishment over his freer-speech policies, and if so, why? Literally nothing has changed in policy, anyway, at least not yet, even if Musk has shed a lot of jobs. Why not wait to see what results from Musk’s changes first?
