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The Twitter thing which will increase brand safety worries is the Post-Tweet Singleton Ad: when you open a tweet or Twitter thread in its own page and it is followed by an ad. These change the general promise of context-free ads on a feed to *very* context-associated ad.
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I think this might be mobile only and Twitter has, in my experience, been very cautious in what Tweets it gets attached to. But if caution gets thrown to the wind here it's only a matter of time before someone scrolls down from a racist tweet singleton into a major brand ad...
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That's a nice easy screenshot and major embarrassment for a brand and when they pull spend it becomes a *big* pull.
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This is the thing, Twitter gets enough traffic that it *could* become profitable with ads, but doing so would require *a lot* more moderation than it does right now to guarantee brand safety and it thus far has proven unwilling to do so for better or worse.
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This is why M*sk's brain went to expensive user features, even if he prob doesn't understand why. Twitter has a very straightforward dial to twirl, but it isn't what you think. On one side of the dial is *moderation* (not ads) and on the other side is 'getting users to pay more'.
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There's a strange sort of irony here because in many ways this is *Tr*mp* and M*sk fan-boys fault. Brand safety concerns being this high wasn't really a thing pre-2015 and btw the first protest to reach digital advertisers was uhhhh G*m*rG*te.
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Never forget the IBM vs Gamasutra bit! This isn't to discredit the technique. It clearly works. And these days most people are using it for good and advertisers have learned enough to not be quite so easily manipulated by bad actors...
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But it would be crazy not to realize that the moderation is here at the level it is because of advertisers and b/c people, including M*sk, can't stop sprouting hateful offensive nonsense that advertisers don't want to be next to.
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lol people Twitter doesn't do moderation for *you* or for *fun* or even because the government might get angry at it. Twitter does moderation *for advertisers*. This is the core thing that M*sk and most of the bullshit free speech (for me but not for thee) brigade don't get.
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The other piece of the balance is users. Will moderation scare away the user base? The common thought leader position is 'yes'. But ... ehhhh ? I mean, sure, some of the current users will leave, but a safer more welcoming Twitter would absolutely gain users as well.
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Arguably, this is already happening, with the big users who make the most activity and impact, just on the *fear* that moderation will get less effective... reuters.com/technology/exclusive-where-did-tweeters-go-twitter-is-losing-its-most-active-users-internal-2022-10-25/
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Here is the thing even 10% is a lot of people for sure. If we go with the approx of 240m users that's still 2.4m. But I suspect that it gets even narrower and that we have a 1% and a .1% that generate a big chunk of that 50% of revenue...
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And the power of those individual users only grows as high value followers of the type advertisers want to reach leave the platform for significantly less (at least obviously) fraught platforms focused on style-section-type content.
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These are generally feel-good topics and Twitter wants to capture engagement around that. It needs to be doing what it can to make Twitter feel good, not make their lives harder. That turns into more monetizable tweets, especially big ones. That's the only way it grows in revenue
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This is a really key thing about the likely 1% and Post-Tweet Singleton Ads, the existence of the format means that a safe good twitter users can potentially grow their share of generated revenue *exponentially*. Post-Tweet Ads are a lot of potential supply...
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And the thing about web ad supply is that it doesn't just increase the number of ads but it allows machines to optimize the direction of ads and create more value and higher CPM per impression.
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The thing that makes Twitter unique from almost every other social media network is that on-boarding 1 million assholes will generate less revenue than a single popular beloved user.
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And Twitter's greatest flaw is that every single beloved user has like... a 1 in 20 chance of catching Twitter brain-worms and dumping all their value to the platform's business model right out the window.
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