New Twitter owner Elon Musk has threatened to publicly slam advertisers who no longer run ads on the platform. The US billionaire was reacting to a right-wing lobbyist’s suggestion that he should name such companies so that his supporters could subject them to a “counter-boycott”.
Musk wrote in his response over the weekend, “Thanks. A thermonuclear naming and shaming is exactly what will happen if this doesn’t stop.” In the past few days, the Volkswagen Group, the pharmaceutical company Pfizer and the food giant Mondelez, among others, had announced that they would suspend advertising on Twitter. The companies fear Twitter may tolerate more hate speech and abuse under Musk.
Subscription campaign should bring money
Advertising revenue is vital for Twitter: most recently, it accounted for a good 90 percent of revenue. Musk is also hoping for additional money from the subscription business. To do this, he changes the procedure for assigning the verification ticks, which previously guaranteed the authenticity of the profiles of celebrities, politicians or companies, for example. They were free and granted by Twitter after an audit. In the future, they will be available for customers of the Twitter Blue subscription service for eight dollars a month.
The revenue potential of the subscription offer is meanwhile unclear. According to the latest data from the end of June, Twitter had almost 238 million daily active users. On that basis, that would be an additional roughly $1.9 billion a month if each of them paid for verification — which is totally unrealistic. Twitter made almost $1.2 billion in revenue with its previous business in the second quarter. After the acquisition by Musk, the company no longer has to publish financial figures.
So far, the new Twitter owner has not given any information about how many employees he will lay off. The media had reported around 3,700 affected jobs, which corresponds to around half of the workforce. The tech journalist Casey Newton, who is well connected in online networks, also wrote that he had heard of employees who were laid off on Friday and received offers to return at the weekend.
Musk defended the broad job cuts. Twitter is losing more than $4 million a day, so there was no alternative, he wrote. Musk didn’t address the role servicing debt he incurred for the roughly $44 billion acquisition might play in the loss.
On the other hand, he emphasized that the laid-off employees would be offered three months’ salary – one more than is required by law in California. According to media reports, employees still have to make commitments to Twitter for the additional salary.
The Linz-based UN Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, criticized the new Twitter owner Musk in an open letter over the weekend and called for responsible operation of the global platform. The fact that almost all human rights and ethics experts on Twitter were said to have been fired is “not an encouraging start” to Musk’s era on Twitter, High Commissioner Türk wrote to the technology billionaire on Saturday.
Source: Nachrichten
