Blue bird in trouble: Twitter has lost 50 percent of its ad revenue

It’s a tough time for micro-blogging platform Twitter. It has lost almost half of its advertising revenue since Elon Musk’s takeover that happened in October 2022. Musk picked up the platform for $44 billion. Since his takeover Musk sacked about half of Twitter's 7,500 staff when he came on board in an effort to cut costs.

Musk, who has been outspoken about the difficulties facing the company, responded to a tweet of a user who was giving suggestions on financing for the platform. "We're still negative cash flow, due to 50% drop in advertising revenue plus heavy debt load," the billionaire tweeted. "Need to reach positive cash flow before we have the luxury of anything else," he added, without further explanation.

Recently, Twitter announced that it will start sharing revenue with creators on its platform. This means that creators can get a share in ad revenue, starting with the replies to their posts. "This is part of our effort to help people earn a living directly on Twitter. We're rolling out the program more broadly later this month, and all eligible creators will be able to apply," Twitter said in a blog post.

The platform has set three criteria to be eligible for the monetization program. Creators have to be subscribed to Twitter Blue or Verified Organizations, have at least 5 million impressions on their posts in each of the last three months, and pass human review for Creator Monetization Standards. One of the creators, writer Brian Krassenstein, who has over 750K followers on the social media platform, tweeted that he had received nearly $25,000 from Twitter. The social media company said the payments will be delivered via Stripe, a financial and SAAS company. Creator Ads revenue sharing will be available in all countries where Stripe supports payouts.

Twitter’s competition Threads by Instagram made some big headlines recently. Threads became the fastest growing app as it registered over 100 million users in the first five days of its launch. It’s early days to predict if brands will aggressively start Thread-ing. According to a report by CNBC, Threads is already seeing a drop in daily user numbers. Not just that but the time users are spending on the app is also on the decline. For now it’s all about survival of the fittest.