A year has passed since Elon Musk began his acquisition of Twitter and the social network has undergone several metamorphoses.becoming the focus of news of all kinds due to its eccentric owner, and now the network is struggling to implement different types of monetization beyond traditional advertising.
This Tuesday marks one year since Twitter accepted the purchase offer of the then richest man in the world for 44,000 million dollars.although the process was not closed until the end of October.
Freedom of expression is the foundation of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital public square where issues vital to the future of humanity are debated,” Musk said in April 2022, in a statement announcing the deal in bombastic style. .
But this year Musk, who has reinstated various accounts banned by the previous administration, has removed the megaphone from anonymous users and has passed it on to those who pay a monthly fee, since they will have the right to a preferential place in the viewing of the network.
Companies and advertisers have fled before the arrival of Musk
Musk’s constant controversies and sudden changes – such as changing the Twitter logo for the Dogecoin cryptocurrency for several days – have caused advertisers to flee en masse from the social network founded in 2006, which caused advertising revenue to drop. recently fell by as much as 75%, according to The Washington Post.
Yet despite the exodus, a handful of major companies – including Apple, Disney and McDonald’s – continue to advertise on Twitter.
And the network continues to be the preferred one for political communication by governments and rulers, parties, personalities and organizations of all kinds.
Radical platform changes
The purchase of Twitter, financed with a mix of loans and capital commitments, including from Musk’s own wealth, has saddled the company with approximately $1 billion in annual interest payments.
It might interest you: Elon Musk insults an employee with a disability on Twitter, fires him, apologizes and tries to rehire him?
Since Musk took the reins, he has implemented various forms of monetization: he laid off 80% of his workforce, auctioned off his office furniture, and recently announced that he would limit access to his application programming interface (API) – software tools that they allow outside researchers and developers to collect and analyze data – and they will charge a fee in most cases.
The most notorious measure were the changes in Twitter Bluea subscription that already existed before the incorporation of Musk, but that under the leadership of the businessman became paid, when before Twitter gave it free to personalities and organizations.
For what counts as that of the singer Beyoncé, that of the first lady of the United States, Jill Biden, or that of the businessman Bill Gates, now they look the same as that of any other user.
He New York Times It was one of the first outlets to announce that it would not pay the 8 dollars to give its employees the blue mark or the 1,000 to obtain the yellow verification for the official media account, something that did not sit well with Musk, who then described it as “diarrhea” the content of the newspaper account.
Only 0.2% of Twitter users pay for Twitter Blue and according Similarwebin March, Twitter Blue had around 116,000 confirmed subscriptions on the web, 138% more than the previous month.
The advantages provided by a Twitter Blue account are that users can write longer content, post longer videos, edit their tweets and have more visibility in the social network algorithm.
Changing algorithms
Since Musk took the reins, he has changed the structure of the network by adding a tab called “For you”, very similar to that of other networks such as TikTok and Instagram, in which users do not see the information of the people they follow. chronologically, as before, but tweets that might interest them.
An analysis of The Washington Post He points out that Twitter amplifies hate speech in its “For You” section, due in part to Musk’s decision to restore thousands of previously suspended accounts – including that of former President Donald Trump, who has yet to use his account.
Internal changes have resulted in various failures and crashes in the system. In February, Twitter experienced four outages to its app, according to The New York Times.
Twitter, a ‘stressful’ process, says Musk
This month, in an interview with the BBC, Musk described his first six months in effective command of the social network as “a pretty stressful situation.”and the billionaire has confessed to sleeping at Twitter headquarters on more than one occasion.
But he noted that Twitter could achieve “positive cash flow” this quarter “if current trends hold.”
However, since the company went public, information about its finances cannot be verified, nor can the users of the app be verified.
The last:
EFE International news agency based in Madrid and present in more than 110 countries.
