Well. Good luck, Eelon. You'll need it.
As Elon Musk hurtles towards
Oct 25 (Reuters) - "Is Twitter dying?" billionaire Elon Musk mused in April, five days before offering to buy the social media platform.
The reality, according to internal Twitter(TWTR.N) research seen by Reuters, goes far beyond the handful of examples of celebrities ghosting their own accounts. Twitter is struggling to keep its most active users - who are vital to the business - engaged, underscoring a challenge faced by the Tesla Inc (TSLA.O) chief executive as he approaches a deadline to close his $44 billion deal to buy the company.
Who are these "active users"?
These "heavy tweeters" account for less than 10% of monthly overall users but generate 90% of all tweets and half of global revenue. Heavy tweeters have been in "absolute decline" since the pandemic began, a Twitter researcher wrote in an internal document titled “Where did the Tweeters Go?”
Let that sink in. Twitter's business model relies on a fraction of its users to account for 90% of engagement and half of its ad revenue. Now, I'm no highly paid graduate of an elite MBA course, but to my untrained eye this seems untenable.
Oh, but it gets worse. What would get these "super users" back? Well:
Cryptocurrency and "not safe for work" (NSFW) content, which includes nudity and pornography, are the highest-growing topics of interest among English-speaking heavy users, the report found.
At the same time, interest in news, sports and entertainment is waning among those users. Tweets on those topics, which have helped Twitter burnish an image as the world’s "digital town square," as Musk once called it, are also the most desirable for advertisers.
Let me break this down: Twitter has been relying on a minor cohort of its users to drive traffic. Yet the things Twitter is known for no longer interests this cohort. Which is a shame for the business, as it's these interests which attract advertisers. Jake from State Farm doesn't want to have his ad next to a tweet containing the latest hot porn, or a tweet advertising a crypto scam.
Now, Musk has mused about making Twitter ad-free and a subscription service. But let's be honest: Who wants to pay a monthly fee for that hellsite? Certainly not the "super users". And likely not anyone else. If Musk does go the subscription route, Twitter will die a quick death, and probably ruin him financially. If he backtracks and keeps the current, ad-based model, the problems described in the Reuters article will only continue to get worse, especially if he makes it a bigger version of Gab or Parler. People may not delete their accounts, but they probably just won't engage at all. Once that ball starts rolling, the momentum would be impossible to stop. And, again, Musk would be ruined financially.
This sums up the dilemma:
“It seems as though there is a significant discrepancy between what I might imagine are our company values and our growth patterns,” one Twitter researcher wrote.
So, stick a bag of popcorn in the microwave and sit back. This should be fun.
***
Enjoyed this post? Never miss out on future posts by following us.