Twitter has lost about half of its ad revenue since Elon Musk owned it

The blue bird is not really a goose. Elon Musk said on Saturday July 15 that Twitter, which he bought for $44 billion in October 2022, had lost roughly half of its ad revenue. “We are still in a negative cash flow situation, due to an approximately 50% drop in advertising revenues and the heavy debt load”replied the billionaire on Twitter to a user who made strategic suggestions regarding the social network. “We have to get to positive cash flow before we have the luxury of doing anything else”he added, without further details.

The developments undertaken by Elon Musk since his takeover of Twitter have angered many network users and advertisers. In May, consulting agency Insider Intelligence said Twitter was on track to earn less than $3 billion in 2023, almost a third less than in 2022.

Since then, the billionaire has made other announcements that have displeased Internet users, such as, in early July, his intention to restrict the reading of tweets to 10,000 per day for verified accounts, therefore paying, to 1,000 for others and even 500 for new accounts. A few days later, the announcement of the restriction of the TweetDeck application, widely used by information professionals, to certified accounts, therefore paying, also displeased.

Threads competition

The changes come as Threads, an app launched by Facebook parent company Meta to compete with Twitter, passed the 100 million user mark just five days after its July 5 launch.

The number of Threads users is still far from that of Twitter, which has between 200 and 350 million users, according to estimates. But Meta’s app can rely on synergies with popular image-sharing app Instagram, which has some 2 billion active users.