How much of that is because of politics? Already at the point of takeover, Musk was so hated by half the US for various reasons that it became profitable for major publishing platforms to abandon Twitter/X "on principle". When you're in that situation, nothing on the object-level can help you - neither good management nor technical competence. Revenue depends indirectly on the public opinion, and half of it wants nothing to do with you.
US nuclear arsenal is not in this situation.
If I owned a bill board space, and set everything around it on fire, wouldn't you think it was my fault that advertisers didn't want to pay to use it any more?
I mean, why do people who hate what Twitter is now care about it's lost revenue? Especially given what it was, and where the revenue came from, this isn't exactly an argument that generalizes well.
Reason being, look at Tesla stock price: Musk's gaffes have a short term impact, but overall the price is way up since buying Twitter.
We can argue the first part all day. The point was Coca Cola and co. did not want to assossiate anymore and that had an objective dollar amount.
I know less about this situation, but Twitter in 2024 apparently made some controversial blocking changes and that started the bluesky migration. I don't know the dollar amount there, but they apparently lost some big influencers.
No, Musk became hated by half the US __because__ of the way he took over Twitter. That lost him a great deal of good will.
The US government is a lot more affected by politics than twitter will ever be.
I can easily imagine this to alone be responsible for wiping 84% revenue.
Real world has a different political distribution than the Internet. "Politically toxic" on-line in particular is a knee-jerk reaction that is great at generating consistent revenue streams for publishers and social media on-line, but doesn't translate well to how the entire population of a country actually thinks or votes in the real world.
5% different, almost everyone is online.
But, thinking about your oft-quoted blog post about advertising bring a cancer, I guess if the top ad spenders cut themselves out entirely, then the bidding system could result in the runner-up bidder finding their ads are now almost arbitrarily cheaper.
We at best get 70% participation in voter representation. Online wise, I'd wager we get at best 20% "public" participation in terms of who bothers to participate online as opposed to lurking. And that 20% is spread amongst hundreds of subjects.
And we know these aren't created equal. The internet is disproportionately on the younger side, is very slightly biased by "middle class", educated workers, and the gender demographics vary site to site, despite being overall even (e.g. disproportionately male on Reddit, female on Pintrest). There will definitely be a different resuts online compared to making physical surveys.
