New Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino has started work at the company weeks earlier than expected amidst a leadership vacuum and plummeting ad revenue.
Yaccarino was originally expected to begin her new role closer to the start of July, but recent developments within the social media company might have forced her to take on the new role sooner than expected.
The move comes as three key members of Twitter’s advertising department have resigned in quick succession and internal documents reveal a 59% drop in US ad revenue from April to the first week of May compared to the previous year.
We are super excited and a warm welcome to Linda Yaccarino @lindayacc in her role as the new @Twitter CEO 💙
You have our support @elonmusk pic.twitter.com/hhgdanSTc5— Eva McMillan ♥️ (@EvasTeslaSPlaid) June 5, 2023
The three executives that have departed from the company include the head of trust and safety Ella Irwin, head of brand safety and ad quality AJ Brown, and brand safety partnership program manager Maie Aiyed.
According to a report by The Register, the resignations are related to exacerbating ad revenue at the bird company.
Meanwhile, Twitter has also brought on former NBCUniversal advertising executive Joe Benarroch to join the leadership team in a bid to address the dire state of the company’s ad revenue.
Benarroch was senior vice president of communications, advertising and partnerships at the media giant. He also worked for a number of years at Meta, the company behind Facebook and Instagram. At Twitter, he will focus on business operations.
Twitter’s Ad Sales Drop Almost 60%
Documents obtained by The New York Times show that Twitter’s US advertising revenue dropped around 60% year over year during a recent five-week period.
The NYT reported that the company’s US advertising revenue for the five weeks from April 1 to the first week of May was $88 million, down 59% from a year earlier.
The report further noted that Twitter had regularly fallen short of its weekly sales projections, sometimes by as much as 30%, and predicted that June’s ad revenue in the US will be down at least 56% each week compared to the same period in 2022.
In March, Elon Musk informed employees that Twitter’s value was $20 billion, despite having purchased the company for $44 billion.
However, amid Twitter’s mounting issues, a new analysis by Fidelity claimed that the company’s value has further decreased to $15 billion, a third of its previous value before Musk’s takeover.
Twitter Users Are Quitting the Platform En Masse
Based on data from analytics platform Similar Web, both the web and mobile app usage of Twitter have declined.
The social media’s ad portal experienced an 18.7% decline in monthly traffic in March compared to the previous year.
In late March, Musk claimed that Twitter now occupies over 8 billion minutes of users’ time each day, which he presented as a new milestone.
However, it appears that the social media platform’s usage among the general public has been on the decline since the beginning of 2023, following a period of growth late in 2022.
On the other hand, according to Statista’s data, social media advertising revenue is forecasted to increase from approximately $200 billion presently to $247 billion by 2027, emphasizing Twitter’s error in the field of advertising revenue.
It is worth noting that Twitter accounted for 5% of share of the global social media advertising market.
However, with the continued decline in its advertisers, the social media company’s share is now likely much less than 5%.
While Twitter is striving to recover its ad revenue, the company will likely face increasing competition as social media ad spending is going to slow down considerably in the coming years.
According to estimates by Statista, social media ad spending will drop to 3% by 2027 compared to 48% in 2018.
