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You don't have to support Musk by using Twitter. [1]

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Date: 2023-03-09

Musk is the real problem, not Twitter itself.

Recently I’ve been seeing people here trying to argue that merely using Twitter is showing support for Elon Musk. Most recently in this article (“If You’re Still on Twitter, You’re Part of the Problem.”) and a number of the comments.

Mostly, this argument hinges on ads on Twitter. Advertisers pay Twitter for ads, Twitter users see or interact with the ads, the advertisers pay Twitter, and thus Twitter makes money. It seems pretty simple and straightforward… except it’s really not, because there are multiple kinds of ads on Twitter, and some pay Twitter more than others.

Per Twitter's page on ad campaigns, there’s multiple kinds of ad campaigns that an advertiser can purchase. The short version is that ads directed at users are either Promoted Ads (ads which promote a particular tweet) and Follower Ads (ads which promote a particular account). These ads generally focus on impressions, the number of eyeballs on an ad, and engagements, the number of interactions with an ad.

So first I’ll talk about impressions. The fact of the matter is that impressions are almost trivial by comparison to engagements — advertisers pay Twitter a small amount per 1,000 interactions with an ad. I don’t know the exact amount that an advertiser pays because it depends on individual factors, but we’re only talking about a fraction of a cent per individual interaction even under the most favorable circumstances.

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that the average Twitter user were to see ten ads a day. Based on hypothetical cost of .2 cents per interaction, that’s 2 cents a day, and 60 cents in the average month. Even if you doubled or even tripled that amount, it’s still a vanishingly small amount per user compared to Twitter’s total ad revenue. Yeah, I don’t think Musk is going to be seeing much revenue from ad impressions.

Where the actual money for Twitter comes from is in ad engagement. Per this site, an advertiser pays Twitter between 50 cents and 2 dollars per action on a promoted tweet, and between 2 and 4 dollars for following a promoted account. Furthermore, the former has multiple ways a user can interact with a tweet, such as clicking on it, replying to it, and retweeting it. Needless to say, interacting with an ad is substantially more profitable to Twitter than just seeing it. Even one interaction with an ad effectively produces as much or more monthly revenue to Twitter as a whole month of seeing ads on it.

90% of Twitter's $4.4 billion revenue last year was from ads. But the amount of money gained from impressions could only have been a fraction of that, even in aggregate. Twitter had 368 million active users last year (of which less than 20% are from the US), so based on the calculations I made earlier, that means maybe a tenth of their total ad revenue was from ad impressions. Yeah, sure, that’s a heck of a lot of money, but Twitter would quickly fold if all they had to go on was the money from ad impressions as opposed to ad engagements.

All that said, I fully approve of starving Musk of as much of that ad revenue as we can. My point is that this is not an all-or-nothing proposition of “quit Twitter or you’re helping Musk” as some would like to argue. So I’m going to outline some things that a person who’s still using Twitter can do in order to facilitate this goal.

Use an ad blocker and script blocker when accessing Twitter from a website. This blocks both ad impressions and ad engagements entirely. For example, the Duck Duck Go browser extension is good for this.

Minimize use of the Twitter app, as it cannot be ad-blocked.

Do not interact with ads on Twitter if you do see them — don’t click on them, don’t like them, don’t reply to them, and so on.

I’m not saying sign up for Twitter or anything like that; this is specifically for people who, for whatever reason, are continuing to use it. I also recommend looking at alternatives to Twitter such as Mastodon even if you are currently using Twitter. I barely use social media myself, so there may be other alternatives out there as well.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/3/9/2157162/-You-don-t-have-to-support-Musk-by-using-Twitter

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