Discussion

• @alexeheath Alex Heath on x

  Musk laid off dozens of Twitter employees across sales and engineering last week. It's his third round of cuts since saying layoffs were done in November. Meanwhile, he has given those remaining a week to make ad targeting work like Google search ads https://www.theverge.com/...

• @mikeisaac Rat King on x

  twitter has been attempting to build a direct response ads business for nearly its entire existence BUT they never had a one-week deadline to motivate them before.... https://www.theverge.com/... https://twitter.com/...

• @mikeisaac @mikeisaac on x

  @eric_seufert they've had fits and starts but I agree it wasn't the top priority — i do think there have been halfhearted attempts over the years though. (My main point is more about the time frame than the level of intensity of them trying over time)

• @cooperlund Cooper Lund on x

  I like that if you kind of squint your mind's eye you can see the hustle and grind memes he saw that inspired him to make these management decisions. An image of a weirdly muscular lion with “IT'S NOT IMPOSSIBLE, IT'S THAT NOBODY WAS STRONG ENOUGH TO ASK” over it in impact font. …

• @goldman Jason Goldman on x

  @MikeIsaac Imagine filing a jira ticket that says “make it work like Google's $200b ad business by end of week”

• @rahaeli @rahaeli on x

  Needless to say, it cannot be solved in a week.

• @charlesengelke Charles Engelke on x

  Well, that's about how long it took Google to create its ad targeting, right? https://twitter.com/...

• @rahaeli @rahaeli on x

  Ads perform badly on social media as opposed to search because search is a one and done action and you can be distracted from it after. Social media is ongoing and distractibility is low. No one has ever solved this problem.

• @rahaeli @rahaeli on x

  Facebook sidestepped it for a while because of the size of its platform and the incredibly invasive targeting and profiling system they built. (And by straight up lying to advertisers.) No one else ever has. I've been saying it's unsolvable for a very long time.

• @carnage4life Dare Obasanjo on x

  @MikeIsaac Is he asking for a direct response business or contextual ad targeting based on content of nearby tweets? I thought it was the latter from his tweets.

• @jo_clever_ke @jo_clever_ke on x

  What are the odds that this ends up with them trying to scam the advertisers into believing they have something that works? Like Facebook's BS autoplay metrics but much less believable? https://twitter.com/...

• @eric_seufert Eric Seufert on x

  @MikeIsaac I'd push back on this. Twitter's management historically underinvested into ads infrastructure — they conscientiously avoided emulating Facebook & didn't adequately resource the ads product. Parag was no different. His first big decision as CEO was to fire the ads & pr…

• @edzitron Ed Zitron on x

  Hmm. We're losing advertisers constantly....what if we made the experience...worse https://twitter.com/...

• @pinboard @pinboard on x

  @MikeIsaac I can't wait until he sends a rocket full of fanboys to Mars and challenges them to find a way to make fuel before the air runs out.

• @donachaidh @donachaidh on x

  He's just flinging shit at the wall hoping something will stick, but he hasn't even hit the wall yet https://twitter.com/...

• @adamscochran Adam Cochran on x

  Make it work like Google Ads... You can't. That's keyword based from search.. But you can easily 10x ARPU by allowing third-party data targeting back on, and just don't allow it for political/news ads. Oh and you can fix the broken lack of Boolean logic in targeting. https://twit…

• @riolongacre @riolongacre on x

  @MikeIsaac Is he trying to built a direct response ad targeting system, à la Meta, or a contextual ad serving system more akin to Google AdWords. He needs to be very clear before he starts cracking the whip and threatening to sack people.