Twitter’s biggest spender is worried Musk’s platform is ‘high risk’ for advertisers

Twitter is waking up to new problems every day for the past two weeks. The micro-blogging site’s biggest revenue source is advertising. That’s one area where Twitter seems to be losing its foothold. A new report suggests that a part of the world’s biggest ad company believes Twitter to be a ‘High-Risk’ platform. This comes after two other major advertising companies suggested moving ad money elsewhere. 

According to a report by Platformer and Digiday, the ‘high-risk’ evaluation is primarily due to the changes being introduced after Musk’s takeover. This includes vacant seats of top executives in the Twitter office. Apart from Twitter firing a host of employees in the first week, many prominent executives have continued to quit the organisation, this includes the head of security and privacy. 

The report also shared a list of solutions that could help advertisement companies regain their trust in the platform. Here’s the list of ‘to-do’s’ for Musk’s Twitter:

• Return to baseline levels of NSFW/toxic conversation on the platform
• Re-population of IT Security, Privacy, Trust and Safety executives
• Establishment of internal checks & balances
• Full transparency on future development plans of community guidelines/ content moderation/ anything affecting user security or brand safety. 
• Demonstrated commitment of effective content moderation

Reportedly, advertisers are also worried if Twitter will follow the FTC guidelines in the coming future. The government agency can slap fines in the billions if the company fails to do so. 

Twitter is already reeling under debt after Musk’s $44 billion acquisition of the platform. He decided to pay shareholders an inflated share price, which led to higher loans from prominent banks. Musk undertook a $13 billion loan from banks that could generate an interest of $1 billion yearly. Musk also claimed that the platform is losing $4 million daily. However, the introduced changes are not helping the organisation find its feet. 

Musk plans to reduce the platform’s over-dependence on advertising money by bringing forth a new Twitter Blue subscription which is priced at $8 per month. The plan didn’t go as planned and Twitter had to roll back the subscription. Musk did issue a warning on Twitter saying that the platform will be doing a lot of dumb things in the coming weeks. 

The reduction in ad revenue, and a lack of proper subscription models could cause major trouble for the US-based company. Twitter is working towards making robust changes with extremely tight deadlines. However, the development phase of such changes, with trial and error, could hamper its overall pace.