How Users and Advertisers Are Fleeing Twitter Elon Musk
Elon Musk has owned Twitter for less than a month, but the changes in the company are already visible to the naked eye. The social network drastically reduced staff, thought about monetization, scared away advertisers and users. The latter, however, have already found an alternative to Twitter.
The drama surrounding the Elon Musk-Twitter deal seemed to be over with the final agreement between the parties. However, it turned out that everything was just beginning: the new owner began to radically rebuild the work of the social network, look for additional sources of funding and argue with politicians, officials, advertisers and ordinary users.
Disappointed with Musk’s actions, Twitter users began to look for an alternative to the social network. Among the popular options were both the previously known Tumblr and the niche Mastodon. The latter turned out to be so popular that at some point the social network servers could no longer withstand the influx of new users. The company itself noted that since October 27 - it was on this day that control of Twitter passed to Elon Musk and his team - the number of active users every day was just over 1 million people.
Mastodon’s growing audience is just a small part of Twitter’s huge audience. But, experts note, the number of users of the German social network grew even to chaos on Twitter. However, not only Mastodon has become a haven for users who left Twitter.
Little Mastodon
One of the most popular alternatives to Twitter is the German social network Mastodon. Instead of creating an exact copy of Twitter, Mastodon developed a protocol that allows anyone to run their own community server with their own rules. Such servers in the company are called instance.
Such “instances” look very similar to Twitter: there is a feed of posts, the size of which cannot exceed 500 characters, the ability to “like”, “retweet” entries. Each “instance” has its own rules of conduct, and if the operators and owners of other servers using the Mastodon protocol do not like it, then the outcast community can be isolated from the rest. In this case, such an “instance” will continue to work, but access to it by users of other servers will be limited.
This method of moderating content and the site has its own name - Mastodon calls their approach “defederalization”, or defederating. So, in 2019, the social network for right-wing users Gab switched to the Mastodon protocol, after which their “instance” was blocked by the owners of all the site’s large servers. The “right” can still communicate in their “bubble”, but cannot go out and talk to users of other “instances”. Blocking unwanted content or even entire servers is available within each account - users themselves determine which content to consume and which not. Also, part of the Truth Social infrastructure, owned by former US President Donald Trump, works on the Mastodon protocol.
Mastodon was founded in 2016 by a German developer of Russian origin Evgeny Rochko. The first version of the social network protocol appeared in 2017. Rochko began developing the project almost immediately after graduating from university. In his own words, he was a “Twitter fan” at the time, but he wanted to create a platform that wasn’t controlled by one person or company. Thus, the developer explains, it is possible to ensure the independence of online communications.
For a long time, Mastodon remained a niche project, and by the beginning of 2022, the number of registrations of new platform users did not exceed several thousand accounts per day. Everything changed with the start of negotiations between Twitter and Elon Musk: in April, when the billionaire offered to buy out the social network, Mastodon’s audience grew by almost 5 thousand users. When Twitter accepted the offer, that figure rose again, this time with 25,000 new accounts.
After Twitter came under Musk’s control in early November, Mastodon reported 50,000 registrations per day. The growth in the audience of the social network reached its peak after a series of scandals on Twitter - Rochko told Wired that “in just a few weeks” 800,000 new accounts appeared on Mastodon.
As of October 28, Mastodon had 381,000 unique users, but already on November 7, Rochko announced that the number of active visitors per month had exceeded 1 million. Servers are experiencing overloads, it has become more difficult to publish posts, requests to add to communities hang for several days, said the developer. However, despite the explosive growth of the audience, the social network still remains a dwarf in comparison with the “big brothers”: Twitter has 238 million daily active users, Facebook (owned by Meta, recognized as an extremist organization in the Russian Federation, its activities are banned) - 1.9 billion. According to statistics, 10% of users produce 90% of the content and provide half of the company’s revenue. It is the active core of the Twitter audience that has now decided to leave the platform.
Celebrity on the site is also not enough. To date, activist Greta Thunberg, British comedian and TV presenter Stephen Fry, several well-known American journalists and popular Twitter users have moved to Mastodon. Whether Mastodon will be able to at least partially approach the “big brothers” is still unclear. Ulrich Kelber, a member of the German government’s data privacy committee, said EU officials should close their accounts on Facebook, which does not comply with strict European data protection laws, and move to Mastodon.
The popularity of Mastodon did not bypass the attention of Elon Musk, who in one of his tweets ridiculed the technical condition of a competitor. Rochko, however, prefers to take this positively. “Honestly, I think it’s good that he wrote about us. I almost couldn’t see the screenshot due to the dirty screen, but I can say that I don’t mind free ads. He just once again exposed himself to ridicule, ”explains Rochko.
Whatever happens in the future, Rochko remains the only full-time employee of the project for a salary of €2.4 thousand per month. In addition to the founder, Mastodon has a team of volunteers and freelancers. Among them are developers from Russia, Austria, France and the USA. A user from Brazil helps the social network team deal with finances. Some employees work for Mastodon for free, while others receive from €25 to €175 per hour.
The project also receives funding from the community through a page in the Patreon service. In 2021, for example, Mastodon raised €55,000, of which only €23,000 was spent. More work, more stress. I have to work 14 hours a day, sleep and eat little to fix bugs and deal with the load on the servers”, says Rochko.
Tumblr and others
The social network Tumblr also took the opportunity to acquire new users and decided to attract an audience by allowing the publication of erotic content. The site introduced a ban on nude posts in 2018, significantly reducing its popularity. In addition to erotica, Tumblr offered users to purchase blue checkmarks - an analogue of the Twitter account verification symbol. Two ticks will cost the user the price of one from a competitor - for the same $7.99. In total, you can add up to ten checkmarks to your account. They do not carry any additional functionality.
Hardly due to innovation alone, but the number of downloads of the application increased by 57-58%, according to Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic, the company that owns the social network. However, the native inhabitants of the social network - nerds and fandom lovers - are not happy with newcomers: they do not want show business stars, politicians, journalists and other boring people from the mainstream world to invade their cozy world. In the social network “creenposting” has begun, designed to scare off aliens: users vied with each other to publish repulsive and incomprehensible content.
Some Twitter users have taken the unusual route to Clubhouse and the Substack email marketing platform. Finally, there was a proposal to rebuild Twitter in a new place, without Elon. A Google veteran who worked at Twitter from 2014 to 2016, Gabor Kselle wants to create a network called T2 and has already bought a domain for it. The website address for the new project cost Ksella $7.99.
Elon Musk and blue tick
While competitors are thinking about how to lure Twitter users, chaos continues in the social network itself with the advent of Elon Musk. One of Twitter’s biggest new additions to boost revenue is the ability to get an account verification badge — a blue checkmark next to a username — for $7.99. This price includes other benefits of a paid Twitter Blue subscription, but they are still under development at the moment.
The idea to make user verification paid belongs to Elon Musk. Initially, the billionaire planned to set a price tag of $20, but after public dissatisfaction with well-known social network users, he changed his mind. So, for example, the writer Stephen King said that it is the social network that should pay him, and not vice versa.
As a result, Musk came to bargain in a replay to King and asked what he thought about the price of $8. As a result, the cost of the service was fixed at $7.99. Grateful Twitter users responded by launching the #No8ForHate hashtag: under it, they tell what they will spend their $8 on more useful than a blue tick. King continued to criticize Musk, but he still does it on Twitter, and his blue tick is still with him.
The blue-tick scandal came to a head when a journalist from The Washington Post set up duplicate accounts of famous public figures in a matter of minutes and received verification for the specified amount.
Less harmless turned out to be a prank by an anonymous user who created and verified an account clone of the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly. A user wrote on behalf of the company that the insulin it manufactures and sells in the US will now be free. By the way, this scandal alone could cost Musk millions of dollars, because the $330 billion pharmaceutical giant has suspended advertising on the social network. The capitalization of the pharmaceutical giant against the background of what is happening has collapsed by 6%.
In addition to Eli Lilly, Lockheed Martin, Tesla, SpaceX, American and foreign politicians, and Elon Musk himself were hit by clone accounts. Trying to remedy the situation, the billionaire offered an additional verification checkbox that would allow him to distinguish a fake from the truth. Soon the gray inscription Official appeared under the accounts of brands, media, politicians and celebrities. And an hour and a half after the release, it disappeared: Musk said that he personally ordered to “kill the feature.”
In the end, after all that happened, Twitter decided to no longer charge for badges of verified accounts, according to Reuters. The authenticity of the account is now again confirmed by the gray inscription Official.
Staff problems
Paid blue checkmarks have become the loudest, but not the only example of Musk’s destructive influence on the social network. Shortly after the deal, the billionaire fired CEO Parag Agrawal, commercial director Ned Segal and head of domestic policy Vijaya Gadde, accusing them of misinforming the number of fake accounts on the platform.
Twitter PR people have lost their posts. According to American journalists, there are two of them left in the American office. Also, all employees involved in human rights were fired, which is why the social network account was defiantly deleted by the model Gigi Hadid. As for ordinary employees, of whom the company has 7.5 thousand, Musk also announced massive layoffs among them. The survey showed that less than 10% are confident that they will have a job in the next three months.
But the cuts were not without controversy. Massive layoffs at Twitter occurred at lightning speed, and as a result, part of the departments were left without the developers that are required to implement Elon Musk’s ambitious plans. As a result, Twitter was forced to return some of the laid-off employees back. Mostly those who needed a job to extend their American visa agreed, writes journalist Casey Newton.
Elon Musk also took part in the layoffs - he did it publicly. After apologizing on his Twitter page for crashes in the social networking app on Android, the billionaire received a comment from the current developer of the company, who corrected the boss. A verbal altercation ensued, resulting in the developer being fired . A similar fate befell anyone who openly criticized Musk in a Slack work chat.
No money
The financial performance of the company with the advent of Musk fell vertically down. The outflow of advertisers began, because of which the social network loses $4 million daily. According to journalists, Twitter failed to sell enough ads for the first half of 2023 - advertisers do not know what to expect from Musk. As a result, the social network was left without a significant part of the revenue. Musk tried to compensate part of it on his own: on November 13, the media reported that SpaceX paid social networks for Starlink advertising.
In addition to the advertising collapse, Musk had a fight with US officials. In particular, Twitter lawyers who were responsible for interacting with the regulator, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC), fell under massive layoffs. The regulator caught the social network in May using personal data for advertising purposes, issued a warning and threatened that the company would be ordered to pay a huge fine next time. “Elon made it clear that he was only interested in how to monetize Twitter. I don’t believe that he cares about human rights activists, dissidents and other users, ” one of the employees wrote in a social network chat on Slack. In response to criticism, Musk’s personal lawyer stated that “Elon launches rockets into space, he is not afraid of the FTC.”
Since the Musk deal, the company has been weighed down with $13 billion in debt, with $1.2 billion in interest over the next 12 months. The cost of servicing the debt exceeds the cash flow generated by the company, which at the end of June this year was $ 1.1 billion. Musk does not rule out that the company is waiting for bankruptcy or the introduction of a paywall - this time for all users.