Twitter lost 50% of its ad revenue since Musk's takeover

By Al Mayadeen English
Source: Agencies
16 Jul 2023 10:08

Twitter owner Elon Musk says in a tweet his company lost 50% of its ad revenue and should look to solve deep issues before taking on other projects.

Twitter owner Elon Musk reacts as he visits the Vivatech technology startups and innovation fair at the Porte de Versailles exhibition, Paris, France, June 16, 2023. (AFP)

Elon Musk, the world's richest person, said Twitter lost around half of its advertising revenue since he took over the social media giant.

"We're still negative cash flow, due to ~50% drop in advertising revenue plus heavy debt load," Musk explained in a post responding to one of the app's users who suggested a new financing plan for the social media platform.

"Need to reach positive cash flow before we have the luxury of anything else," he said without further elaboration.

Insider Intelligence, a market research company, reported that Twitter is expected to make less than $3 billion in 2023, down around one-third year on year since 2022.

Musk's attempt to draw revenues from the app by instituting an $11 per month payment from verified accounts. Moreover, he recently announced that users' Twitter views will be limited, which would restrict the time they could spend on the app while giving verified accounts the greater luxury of viewing larger amounts of tweets per day.

The tycoon's announcement was followed by the launch of Threads by major rival Meta, as Mark Zuckerberg and his team look to take advantage of Twitter's crisis by drawing its users' toward their free-to-use app.

It is estimated that the Bird app holds around 200 million regular users, however, continuous technical failures due to overcrowding of the app's servers have put Musk under the spotlight.

The world's richest, who also owns Tesla and Space X, threatened to sue Meta, saying they stole trade secrets and intellectual property, claims which Meta denies.