Twitter lost about half of its ad revenue

Elon Musk said Saturday that Twitter, which he bought for $44 billion in October 2022, had lost about half of its advertising revenue.

“We have to get to cash flow positive before we can afford to do anything else,” he added, without elaborating.

unpopular developments

The developments undertaken by Elon Musk since he took control of Twitter have upset users of the network and advertisers. In May, internal intelligence He claimed that Twitter was on track to earn less than $3 billion in 2023, almost a third less than in 2022.

Since then, the billionaire has made other announcements that have upset Internet users, such as at the beginning of July his intention to restrict the reading of tweets to 10,000 daily for verified accounts, therefore paid, to 1,000 for the others and even to 500 for the new ones. .accounts A few days later, another announcement: the TweetDeck application, widely used by information professionals, will be reserved in the next month for certified accounts, therefore paid.

The changes come as Threads, an app launched by Facebook parent company Meta to compete with Twitter, surpassed the 100 million user mark just five days after its launch on July 5. This is the first major threat to Twitter’s ailing platform since the billionaire took it over.

Threads, the competitor launched by Meta

The number of Threads users is still far from that of Twitter, which has between 200 and 350 million users, according to estimates. But Meta’s app may depend on synergies with popular image-sharing app Instagram, which has some 2 billion active users.

Threads’ design looks exactly like its bluebird rival, right down to the blue tick for verified accounts. Unlike Twitter, where the only criteria for brand attribution now is signing up for a paid subscription, Threads verifies that the account is indeed that of the person whose name is displayed.

Elon Musk counterattacked and sent through the lawyer of Twitter’s parent company, X Corp, a letter accusing Meta of violating trade secrets and intellectual property rights.

Facebook’s parent company, headed by Marc Zuckerberg, is accused in particular of having recruited “dozens” of former Twitter employees, according to the document published by the Semafor news site.

Meta has denied the billionaire’s accusations.