As per a new report by Platformer’s Zo? Schiffer, Twitter’s revenue is down by 40 per cent, year over year. The news comes at a troubling time for its billionaire owner Elon Musk, as the first giant interest payment on the company is due by the end of January.
Ever since he took over Twitter Musk has been making a number of changes to the working of the platform, as well as the team that ensures that the platform stays up and running. However, as well-meaning as these changes must have been in his Mind, almost all of them have backfired spectacularly.
Some of the many changes that Musk has made since he took over Twitter include terminating nearly half of all engineers and team leads who kept Twitter running, implemented ill-advised policies, pull them back and repackage them and launch them again, and get into public spats with some of the platform’s most popular and engaging users. To top it all off, Musk had takena very visibly blatant side during the last mid-term elections. All of this has angered even some of his most ardent fans.
More importantly, though, this has put several of the platform’s most prominent advertisers on edge. The fact that Musk got into a public dispute with Apple for stopping advertisements on the platform surely did not help Twitter’s case. Although Musk and Apple’s CEO Tim Cook have seemed to patch things up, for Twitter the damage was already done.
Nearly half of Twitter’s top 100 advertisers have stopped advertising on the platform altogether, and of the remaining, most of them have significantly slashed their Twitter budgets.
Then there is the fiasco of Twitter Blue. At $8 a month per user, Musk and his team had hoped that subscribing or essentially buying a verification badge on Twitter would be a great source of revenue. However, sources say that Twitter hasn’t been able to generate even $1 million from the sale of Twitter Blue.
Twitter’s annual revenue in 2021 was $5 billion, upon which they no profit, but a incurred a loss of over $200 million. That year, Twitter made 92 per cent he firm had predicted in February last year that revenue would increase by between low and mid 20 per cent in 2022 but that hasn’t happened.
Despite Musk’s enormous cost-cutting measures, which include not paying rent, and auctioning furniture and computers from Twitter’s offices. Musk’s attempts to draw investors from Saudi Arabia and Qatar, have also not panned out, at least not in the time frame that he would have wanted to.
While acquiring Twitter, Musk took a loan of $13 billion. By the end of this month, January 2023, he needs to pay $1 billion as an interest payment on the loan. It will be interesting to see if Musk defaults on the payment, or ponies up from his personal wealth, which saw a massive tumble from the $200 billion he once had.
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