Twitter Can Win Back Advertisers

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Feb 13, 8:30AM EST

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Twitter Can Win Back Advertisers — © Scott Olson / Getty Images News via Getty Images

According to CNN Business, 625 of Twitter’s top 1,000 advertisers left it in early January. That is a catastrophe, but Twitter can get some of them back. If it can, Twitter will dodge a disaster that could destroy it financially and harm its ability to pay down debt used to take it private.
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Twitter already has started to use traditional practices to regain ad revenue. It has offered desirable advertising deals at low prices. While these may have had limited success so far, some marketers will use the arrangements if they can do so privately. Twitter remains an effective medium.
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More importantly, Elon Musk must understand that his behavior has hurt his financial prospects. He can do two things to combat that. The first is to take a much lower profile on Twitter. The other is to bring back technology that helps screen out violent and misleading advertising. Spam remains part of Twitter’s inventory. (Click here for the biggest scandals of 2022.)

And Twitter’s success relies on Musk more than anyone else. His financial stake is so high that the effects of his behavior will change his strategy. No matter his reasons, his behavior has cost him billions of dollars.
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A CEO’s behavior can rarely do such significant damage. In most cases, the reason is criminal behavior. That is not Musk’s problem, so his bar is low.
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Musk must realize that his Twitter antics have started sales problems at Tesla, where he does not have a solid executive team. He has to decide how much he wants to damage his flagship company.

Twitter’s fortunes will improve because even Musk, as headstrong as he has been, can read a P&L as well as anyone.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.