Elon Musk bought Twitter, or has come closer to it at least. At the moment, Twitter’s board has a “definitive agreement to be acquired by an entity wholly owned by Elon Musk”. A lot more needs to happen for Musk to take the company private, but seemingly everyone has written about that. This article is adapted from the below video.
Twitter’s usage among media types and the name “Elon Musk,” acting as a sort of traffic accelerant to any story, have created, in my opinion, outsized media coverage, even relative to the size of the acquisition. So I’m limiting my comments to one area where I have some expertise: ads.
It’s well known that Twitter earns most of its revenue from advertising, and my experience with the ads platform is that it’s pretty good. Over the last two years, I’ve only managed about $80k worth of Twitter ads, but I have a lot of prior experience.
Circa 2014ish, I worked on a project that used Twitter ads to create a direct sales lift above just terrestrial and other digital ads. The project had regional split testing, and the data was clear to nearly anyone’s satisfaction.
One of Musk’s many Tweets mentioned vague goals for free speech and product goals on Twitter. The Tweet concluded, “Twitter has tremendous potential – I look forward to working with the company and community of users to unlock it.”
