Twitter owner Elon Musk said Saturday that advertising revenue has dropped 50% just as competition between the microblogging platform and emerging rival Threads intensifies.
Musk also said Twitter still has a negative cash flow because of its heavy debt load.
The social-media site will “need to reach positive cash flow before we have the luxury of anything else,” Musk said in a tweet.
Musk had said in April the company was “roughly breaking even” as advertisers who had left the platform following his acquisition were returning. “Almost all of them have either come back or said they’re coming back,” Musk claimed on Twitter Spaces in April.
Advertiser spending dropped 89% to $ 7.6 million over a two-month period early this year, according to estimates from market research firm Sensor Tower. The top 10 advertisers had spent $ 71 million on ads from September to October of 2022, ahead of Musk’s acquisition, Bloomberg reported.
Musk bought the social-media platform for $ 44 billion in October 2022. The company laid off thousands of employees after the deal and introduced Twitter Blue, which lets all users verify their identities for $ 8 per month. Musk at the same time stripped the traditional blue check marks from accounts Twitter had previously verified as legitimate and prominent or influential.
Meta Platforms Inc. META, -1.45% co-founder Mark Zuckerberg rolled out the new Twitter rival Threads early this month, and it exceeded 100 million users in the days immediately after its launch.
See also: Threads is seeing 25% fewer users than it did during its red-hot launch