Inside information at the Twitter headquarters suggests the company’s daily revenue is suffering after Elon Musk’s takeover of the social network last year resulted in its top advertisers pausing advertising spend on the platform.
According to tech forum, The Information, more than 500 of the company’s top advertisers have paused spending on the platform since Musk’s October takeover.
The social network has been struggling to attract advertisers and users for some time. According to The Information, its daily ad revenue has fallen 40%, from $263 million in Q4 2018 to just $141m in Q1 2019.
The company also posted a net loss of $143m during the same period.
It is speculated that advertisers are fleeing the platform after Musk’s controversial contact moderation policies, which include reinstating Donald Trump'’ banned Twitter account and firing executives in charge of curbing hate speech.
Twitter’s workforce has shrunk by about 75%.
Despite this, Twitter’s media partnerships remain strong, with a foundation through the platform’s deals with more than three dozen media companies, including popular news organisations like Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Bloomberg and Forbes.
The social network also has major partnerships with US sports leagues, including NFL, NBA and Nascar.
Twitter’s dwindling business performance comes on the back end of finally acknowledging cutting access to its API. It was recently speculated that the company had cut API access to third-party apps, with functionality from the apps becoming noticeably limited.
Earlier this week, the company finally acknowledged it in a tweet, stating that Twitter was enforcing its “long-standing API rules”, which might result in some apps not working.
However, the company offered no explanation of which “long-standing API rules” developers of third-party apps were violating.
With no official explanation from Twitter about why some third-party apps are running, some third-party apps have been deleted amid their loss of API access to the platform.
Speculations circulating on the internet suggest that the company is trying to shut down any features or functionality offered by third-party apps and could be considered competition for its product or even something that could harm it in any way.
Users who make use of third-party apps will, in effect, not be able to post tweets from such apps, which is one of the most common uses for these apps. Marketing and media organisations and businesses reliant on features such as scheduling tweets and posting from third-party apps will also probably be affected.
IOL Tech