Despite Elon Musk’s efforts to monetize Twitter, the micro-blogging platform reported a massive 40 percent drop in revenue and adjusted earnings for December 2022, the media reported on Saturday.
Several advertisers “ditched the social-media platform following Elon Musk’s takeover”, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter.
In an update to investors, Twitter reported a 40 percent decline (year-over-year) in both revenue and adjusted earnings for December.
The company recently made a first interest payment to banks that lent $13 billion to help Musk buy Twitter.
Twitter did not comment on the report.
Musk had predicted in November that Twitter may go bankrupt. He fired thousands of employees and shut down offices across the world in order to cut expenditures.
The company had lost half of the top 100 advertisers in less than a month after the billionaire took office. Later, some advertisers returned to the platform.
Musk said last month that Twitter will immediately begin sharing advertising revenue with creators “for ads that appear in their reply threads”.
The Twitter CEO apologized for showing too many irrelevant and annoying advertisements on the micro-blogging platform and said that the company is taking corrective measures to improve the algorithm.
“Sorry for showing you so many irrelevant & annoying ads on Twitter! We’re taking the (obvious) corrective action of tying ads to keywords and topics in tweets like Google does with search. This will improve contextual relevance dramatically,” he had posted.
