Starting August 7th, advertisers that haven’t reached certain spending thresholds will lose their official brand account verification. According to emails obtained by the WSJ, brands need to have spent at least $1,000 on ads within the prior 30 days or $6,000 in the previous 180 days to retain the gold checkmark identifying that the account belongs to a verified brand.
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Threatening to remove verified checkmarks is a risky move given how many ‘Twitter alternative’ services like Threads and Bluesky are cropping up and how willing consumers appear to be to jump ship, with Threads rocketing to 100 million registrations in just five days. That said, it’s not like other efforts to drum up some additional cash, like increasing API pricing, have gone down especially well, either. It’s a bold strategy, Cotton — let’s see if it pays off for him.
Just a few more failed businesses and in about 50 years he’ll be all set to run for POTUS as the Republican nominee.
andrr_464@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Bro what is elon doing???
enu@lemm.ee 1 year ago
At this point, I’d say: Providing entertainment to the internet while also helping grow the fediverse
theTrainMan932@infosec.pub 1 year ago
Having never been on twitter myself I’m especially entertained, watching and laughing from a far corner of the internet
007v2@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I think the combination of sheer incompetence and his overlord bosses wanting to kill Twitter. Which is wild to me, since it could have been used as a propaganda tool for him ultimately worth more than the money he paid for it, despite the ‘worth’ of the company. The guy lives in a bubble with yes men surrounding him. He is the epitome of the meme “is it me that’s wrong? - no everyone else is out of touch”.
jsveiga@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Since he started his act about buying Twitter I saw that as a personal vendetta to harm it - the ultimate tantrum for being mocked at there and not being under his control. He said he’d buy then backed off just to hurt Twitter’s value, but then when he was forced to buy it for the first offer value, he got even more butthurt.
It’s pretty clear that everything he’s done since is to get revenge and destroy it. It’s insane that some people keep praising his decisions towards Twitter as anything but ridiculous.
He’s the rich brat who doesn’t get brown nosed by the waiter in front of his date, then proceed to buy the restaurant just to fire the guy.
JDPoZ@lemmy.world 1 year ago
DrQuint@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Eh, with Elon, I prefer to assume stupidity over malice, because he also had already done shit to hurt his own image before he owned Twitter. Who was he being malignant against then? Himself? To own, uh, his supported??? Everything falls in place by just doing the single logical step of “he dumdum”.
penguin@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Didn’t he offer to buy it so he could sell a bunch of tesla shares without sinking the value? And then he tried to back out, but was forced to buy it.
dangblingus@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Saudi Arabia put up 20 billion or so of the 44 he used to purchase twitter. The reason behind this is widely speculated to be Saudi Arabia wanting to destroy twitter because it was instrumental in the Arab Spring uprising.
oneofthemladygoats@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
They didn’t put new money into the purchase, they rolled their pre-existing shares over. Dorsey did the same FYI.
Y’all are giving this idiot waaaay too much credit when it comes to scheming behind the scenes. It was a really poorly thought out pump and dump, nothing more. There’s no big evil master plan; he’s just really that stupid, and rich enough to constantly fail upwards. With Xitter we’re just seeing his xitty ideas in their purest form, without the influence of the handlers he has to manage his bullxit at his other companies.
Although I have to say, the accidental brilliance of going with branding that’s so phonologically flexible is pretty fantastic, the jokes can write themselves now. But I doubt advertisers are going to appreciate the fact that their interactions on Xitter are colloquially becoming known as xcrements now…
assassin_aragorn@lemmy.world 1 year ago
They would’ve had to convince Musk though to take a huge hit to his credibility and ego with this, which I can’t see him agreeing to.
jet@hackertalks.com 1 year ago
He is ensuring his place in history as a seminal business case study.
Rolder@reddthat.com 1 year ago
I can think of two explanations.
He wants to intentionally run Twitter into the ground and destroy it. Probably because people were mean to him on it or something
He’s completely lost his mind and is just being stupid.
Hanlons Razor makes me think it’s 2
elbarto777@lemmy.world 1 year ago
For the first one, just shutting it down would have been enough.
dojan@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Extorting his advertisers, it seems. It’s hella funny.
danielton@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Because he knows nobody is going to want to buy more ad space on a site that is (or at least was) restricting how many posts users can scroll through.
FaceDeer@kbin.social 1 year ago
He previously said that Twitter was in the red when he bought it. So pretty much everything he's been doing has been clearly aimed at either reducing Twitter's expenses or increasing its revenue. Better to have a smaller company that is profitable than a bigger company that is not profitable.
Whether it's working or not, time will tell. But that's the likely motivation behind most of it.
Deadeyegai@lemmy.world 1 year ago
tHe SmArTeSt MaN iN tHe UnIvErSe. Doing small brain things again
be_excellent_to_each_other@kbin.social 1 year ago
The most generous thing I can think of is that it's a social experiment to see just how many ways he can undercut a successful brand and platform before it completely implodes.
001100010010@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 year ago
It’s the result of brain damage from Covid.
echo64@lemmy.world 1 year ago
He’s got a really big loan payment to pay in October, everything is about that to keep it going for another year
Eladarling@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Something about this move makes me feel like he was bragging to somebody about how he managed to own a single letter domain, and his conversation ended up somehow here, with him doubling down on what wasn’t even a good joke to begin with.
This is purely speculative, obviously, but it just makes me think it’s him putting his money where his mouth is to save face to someone else (who is likely bemused at best)
fearout@kbin.social 1 year ago
He’s playing with his new middle age crisis toy. Cars and spaceships became boring.