X is left with advertisers pushing dubious cryptocurrency and AI 'undressing' apps, users say after Musk's outburst
X is left with advertisers pushing dubious cryptocurrency and AI 'undressing' apps, users say after Musk's outburst
Experts in social media and advertising say an advertiser exodus has left X reliant on smaller, less reputable ad buyers.
- X users are complaining about an influx of low-quality ads promoting crypto scams and AI "undressing" apps.
- The decline in reputable advertisers on X has made the platform more reliant on less reputable ad buyers.
- The exodus of advertisers, partially due to Elon Musk's controversial behavior, has left X with a growing revenue gap.
Archive link: https://archive.ph/sbOxS
You advertise to your audience. Ads targeting the perverse and the stupid seem perfectly suited to twitter.
You may not like it, but this is what peak advertising looks like. Add in some T-shirts with swastikas on them, and they've nailed their target demographic.
whoa you're forgetting dick pills
404 Media report[ed] last month that ads promoting "semen stealing" were showing up on the site.
Wait what now
I wanted to see what kind of ads that might actually be since I have zero concept. I do not recommend typing "semen stealing" into Google innocently and hoping for an answer.
I'm going to have some weird ads now...
If you don't want to search it up, here are the first 3 DuckDuckGo results for "semen stealing"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_fatherhood
https://news.yahoo.com/spurgling-stealing-sperm-pregnant-121820779.html
https://www.refinery29.com/en-gb/2022/01/10831906/baby-trapping-illegal
Yea this guy is the hero of the thread, I would have just not bothered with the article if it wasn't for you pointing that line out
Couldn't find that username or email is my favourite person!
Yep, I’ve seen that, along with ads for “jack-off pants”:
Well he told advertisers to fuck off so they did.
To me as an average Joe it seems pretty dumb to tell your advertisers to fuck off when they provide a big chunk of your income but hey, I'm not a stable genius billionaire so I just don't get Elon's 5D chess moves. Right?
What's much more interesting to me is when Facebook and YouTube told advertiser's to fuck off? Because it's the exact same type of ads but people pretend they see Disney and coca cola ads on everything except twitter..
Max? Is that you?
I'm calling it now. Even if his aim was to not destroy Twitter from the inside, he will absolutely say that was his goal when it eventually happens.
People like this never, pathologically, ever, ever admit making a mistake.
He has too much money to give a shit, he lost more money than anyone has literally ever on this deal and he still has more money than almost anyone who's ever lived. Only way he stops being like this is if he drops dead from the inevitable overdose he's queuing up for himself
Eh most of that "money" is actually leveraged Tesla shares. Tesla shares that are overvalued. If he runs Tesla into the ground it's not actually implausible he goes bankrupt.
Of course for the billionaires "going bankrupt" isn't the same as it is for you an me. He'll still live a life of luxury we can't even imagine, he just won't control as much of the economy as he does now. And he can always scam his true believers out of some money by creating a startup promising to to build robot dolphins or whatever (it doesn't matter he's a hype man) which he'll never deliver and idiots will throw money at him.
Weird, this week they’re also claiming that TwitX has 24 times the engaged users of YouTube.
Prime example of "source? trust me bro". Elon can make up whatever metrics he needs to, but it doesn't make the platform any better
Advertisers surely know he's full of crap, too. He can make up fake views, he could even have bots click on ads, but unless he's also going to fake being a customer it will all come out in metrics. Savvy advertisers track all of that. Clicks per display, sales per click.
Maybe misspelled “enraged”?
Tbf I think the YouTube comment section has that one too
I’m curious about what their definition of “engaged” is. I imagine most people don’t make comments on YouTube videos, but twitter’s main focus has always been posting and commenting on others’ posts.
Scrolling by a video without even looking at it counts, apparently.
"The fact that X has made it abundantly clear that it has no desire to create a brand-safe environment has only solidified our recommendations to move to growing platforms with better opportunities for organic discovery," he added.
This is how you say "fuck you too" in corporatespeak
I would personally go with:
"Some may say that Mr. Musk was a visionary, and further to the road map laid out by Mr. Musk during the Dealbook Summit, our organization is happy to assist with bringing said business forecast into reality."
- Past tense on visionary
- brings up him telling companies to "fuck off"
- rubs it in that his financial people have clearly told him that this is how Xitter goes belly-up, and that when he tries to fix it, he just makes it worse.
I don't use Twitter and my life is better off.
It's crazy, any time I open it up I see blatantly obvious rightwing trolls or even gore. My feed pre-Elon didn't look like that, I mostly followed infosec people but they've all gone elsewhere and now it seems I'm being served content that baits me into arguing or converts me.
Ten is a terrible site anyway.
I'm starting to think that telling your customers to "go fuck themselves" may not be a sound business decision.
So that's why my boss won't let me do it.
You couldn't have posted this twenty minutes earlier? Fuck!
Since when do "high quality ads" exist? I mean, the mentioning of "low quality ads" implies that those others might actually exist.
Probably meaning ads for real products and travels etc.
As a current Twitter user I would say there's actually a large void between normal ads and whatever the hell I'm getting served on that platform these days.
Thai and Japanese TV ads are quite something else
loong man
Hell yes time for another compilation video.
Head on! Apply directly to the forehead!
JFC, talk about blast from the past. this is all I will hear for the rest of the day now.
There's low quality ads, shit tier ads and then there's whatever Muskyboi is attracting these days.
This is the last ad that had me paying full attention when it first came on. It was ran during the football finals season and they made two cuts, one for NRL and one for AFL. https://youtu.be/gbMeKMkE_mk
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/gbMeKMkE_mk
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
It's all relative.
Those YT "in video ads" on Internet Comment Etiquette is about as high quality as you can make it. I wouldn't want to skip Erik selling Nord VPN, Raycon, Nobleberry, or anything else he wants to make an ad for.
Elon gets what Elon deserves
But he unfortunately also gets what he doesn't deserve, like billions of dollars
And attention. Can we finally stop talking about him? Who cares at this time.
AI undressing apps you say? AI's about to make that video of Elon telling advertisers to fuck off a lot more surprising.
“What’s that melting refrigerator? I thought this was an undressing app!”
"Oh, my God, that's disgusting! Software that makes naked pics online? Where? Where did they post those?"
I mean....youtube is the same tho. I constantly get ads for apps that are basically flat out saying you can use it to make porn of anyone you want. Not to meniton the constant scams. There is that big one that pops up all the time claiming you can get a online only, no experience necessary, data entry job for Disney starting at something crazy like $25 an hour.
Musk is shit, X is shit but....all of them allow these kinds of ads.
Wait. That job posting is a scam?
People are still on Xitter? Gross.
Xitter is great for keeping the riff Raff contained, else they share their shit takes with the rest of the internet.
What's that you say? Advertisers took his advice at that event seriously?
We learned in D.A.R.E. that X is bad for you. Seems like X in its digital form is also bad for you and for its dealer.
I care just enough to say I don't care.
I was repeatedly called a GPT3 bot on Xitter. This was before it was even public.
You admit you care, and that's the first step to curing your addiction.
Curing my addiction? Hell no, I just substituted it with Mastodon and Lemmy!
I downvote every article giving him attention
How about we agree to call X/Twitter as Xitter. It avoids the confusion.
I find it particularly funny to call it X(formerly twitter) every time I have to mention it.
Also kind of love how Dubious X is as a name cause I always think it's a porn site before my brain clicks
Yup and tweets as xeets pronounced as "shits".
xeets pronounced as "shits"
I would pronounce that "sheeeeeiittts"
Fun fact, the greek far right, anticommunist group during WW2 and after were called "Χίτες"(Chites)
Here's the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
The Organization X (Greek: Οργάνωσις Χ; commonly referred to simply as X ("Chi" in Greek), and members as Chites (Χίτες)) was a paramilitary right-wing anti-communist royalist organization set up in 1941 during the Axis occupation of Greece. Initially an anti-Axis resistance organization, it gradually shifted its focus towards anti-communism. In 1951, X was officially recognized as a National Organization of Internal Resistance by the Greek Ministry of National Defense. Following the end of the Axis occupation, it played an active role in the persecution of communists during the White Terror and various military operations of the Greek Civil War, most notably the Dekemvriana.
Be careful with undressing apps...do not point them at your really weirdo friends.
might have more fun with my weirdo friends than with those apps tbh
I still use Twitter but I have no idea what the quality of ads is like since they're long blocked. I could well imagine that there is some absolute bottom of the barrel garbage and scams a plenty.
That's what happens when you cater to a bunch of right-wing extremists and literally tell mainstream advertisers to fuck off.
Hail adblock!
And it's only a matter of time until those AI undressing app get banned by law. Good.
Didnt Netflix just start doing ads on there again?
Hadn't heard that, do you have a source?
I'd be pretty surprised if most didn't start their ad buys again. Even if it's lower volume (and at discounts). As soon as everyone stops focusing on these things (after a month or whatever) things tend to go back to business as usual.
The article indicates they haven't yet, though.
Eh, maybe if their MAU wasn't just on a continual decline. It's just not sustainable, especially when so much of the MAU are bots.
Wish I could cancel our Netflix subscription for a second time, but fortunately/unfortunately we stopped giving them money when they announced they would fuck around with accounts shared within a family. Eat shit, Netflix
SUCH GUD BIZNESS MAN
Too bad, so sad
Oh no. Anyways...
I can't with this guy anymore, I just can't.
We don’t have to
Maybe one day he'll climb into his Telsa, hit the stage 69 autopilot button and fly back to Mars where his people are from
I have very little doubt that in the mind of Elon Musk the people who after all this are still using X-Twitter are lusers.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
They are also spreading rapidly across the internet, according to data from the social-media analysis firm Graphika, which warned such tools could be used for sextortion and targeted harassment campaigns.
Hamza Mudassir, a strategy consultant and lecturer at Cambridge University, noted that suspicious ads appear across all social-media platforms.
"However, I think the problem with X is that, because all of the large advertisers have effectively walked out, this is what you see in higher frequency, which basically produces a terrible time for genuine users on the platform," he told BI.
Since taking over the site, Musk has slashed X's content-moderation team and reinstated figures such as Alex Jones who was previously removed from the platform for abusive behavior, something that made advertisers distinctly uneasy even before the billionaire's recent controversies.
"The fact that X has made it abundantly clear that it has no desire to create a brand-safe environment has only solidified our recommendations to move to growing platforms with better opportunities for organic discovery," he added.
The Financial Times reported last month that X was attempting to offset the loss of companies like IBM and Walmart by appealing to smaller businesses and aiming to bring in $100 million in political ads during the 2024 election year.
The original article contains 756 words, the summary contains 208 words. Saved 72%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
literally allowed
Back button.
That was a quote from a tweet, not the author's own words
Haven't met the undressing bots yet. But my account somehow ended up in a bot list and I get @ by at least 3-5 crypto bots daily. Quite annoying.
- The exodus of advertisers, partially due to Elon Musk's controversial behavior, has left X with a growing revenue gap.
The main reason Twitter has a revenue gap is that Musk saddled it with $13bn of debt with his leveraged buyout. The business isn't failing because of Musk's management since then, it's failing because that was the purpose derived from the purchase.
The thing is, Twitter is liable for that debt, and they continue to fall further into the red every time they fail to pay their bills and every time they lose advertisers because ad aggregation is their business. So the business is definitely being detrimentally affected by his leadership because he is directly responsible for the underwritten debt of $13bn and the $14 million+interest in unpaid bills, plus probably more than $500 million in unpaid severance pay. He's barely owned the company a year. And there are so many lawsuits that honestly he'll end up owing more just from that.
They're only liable for the debt so long as the business is operational, though. If the business folds, all the debt goes with it.
The point I'm making is that, while the decisions Musk has made since buying it have only made the business worse, ultimately the reason it's going to fail is the huge amount of debt, which is primarily from the leveraged buyout. If anything, Musk's antics are nothing but those of a clown trying to distract from and give plausible deniability against the real evil that's happening.