Twitter Sees 50% Drop in Ad Revenue Post-Musk Acquisition; Revenue Retrenchment Measures Falter

Twitter Inc. experienced a substantial drop in advertising revenue, losing nearly half of its income since being acquired by Elon Musk for $44 billion in 2022. Despite cost-cutting measures, including staff reductions and decreased cloud service bills, the anticipated revenue rebound remains elusive. Musk's alterations to Twitter's content moderation policies, which restrict user accessibility based on subscription status, reportedly drive away advertisers.

According to BBC News, Musk said that Twitter has yet to see an increase in receipts, and originally, they were expecting to see this last month. He explained that they saw July as more promising, but the results were still disappointing.

It was noted that the Twitter owner removed around half of the company's 7,500 employees since taking over in late 2022. He explained that this move was necessary to trim down costs.

After terminating thousands of staff and reducing its cloud service bills, Musk said the company was on track to post about $3 billion in revenue this year. Although this is massive, the amount is much less compared to its revenues in 2021, which reached $5.1 billion.

However, the recent result and development showed that Musk's aggressive cost-cutting plans have little effect or not enough to spark the return of advertisers that have left the company due to the changes in Twitter's content moderation regulations, such as the restriction of how many tweets that a user can read per day based on their subscription status.

Finally, The Guardian reported that Musk said the drop in ad revenue was about 50%, but the timeframe for the decrease is unclear. Amid the chaos in the company's management, Musk hired Linda Yaccarino to replace him as chief executive officer. She was the former head of Comcast's NBCUniversal and now working to increase Twitter's subscription revenue which is her priority.

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