Twitter’s advertising revenue dropped sharply in December 2022, with ad spending from top brands falling 71 percent compared to the same month in 2021.
The data, from Standard Media Index (SMI) data, comes as major corporations attempt to pressure Elon Musk’s Twitter over its restoration of prominent banned conservative accounts.
Data from the same source also found revenue fell by 55 percent in November 2022 compared to the same month in 2021.
Even before Musk began reinstating banned accounts, IPG, one of the world’s top advertising firms, advised its clients to “pause” advertising due to the potential for “unsafe behaviors” to proliferate on the platform.
The continued absence of ad revenue is a major problem for Twitter, which relied on ads for 89 percent of its $5.08 billion revenue in 2021. This is likely a major factor in the massive estimated reduction in Twitter’s value.
Advertising boycotts form a key lynchpin of the online censorship machine. Corporations, usually driven by negative media coverage, have used their economic clout many times in the past to pressure social media platforms to adopt ever-stricter censorship policies.
Prominent examples include the “adpocalypse” on Google-owned YouTube in 2017, when a media-led panic about ads appearing next to extremist content cost the tech platform hundreds of millions of dollars, causing it to clamp down on monetization for independent creators.
In 2020, media dissatisfaction with Facebook’s level of censorship also caused major corporations to slash their ad spending on the platform.
The media has long been aware of the advertising industry’s leverage over social media platforms. Less than two months after Donald Trump’s election in 2016, the New York Times began pressuring advertisers into cracking down on ads appearing on “fake news” websites, a buzzword used at the time to refer to virtually all conservative media that has since been replaced with “misinformation.”
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election.