According to internal company emails viewed by the Wall Street Journal, Twitter is seeking to lure back advertisers by offering free ad space to brands which run advertising campaigns on the social media site.
The report states that Twitter intends to offer to match funds that advertising brands spend on ads, with two caveats. First, the total spend of the campaign cannot exceed $250,000, and second, all of the ad volume of the campaign must be run on the site by February 28th.
Tech media outlets reported that Twitter ran a similar campaign last month, which offered matching ad spend for campaigns with a total spend of up to $500,000, so long as those ads were run on the site by year’s end.
Twitter did not comment on the Wall Street Journal’s report.
The social media platform began hemorrhaging advertisers following the completion of its acquisition by Tesla CEO Elon Musk at the end of October. Brands began pausing their campaigns, worried over controversies engulfing the site over changes Musk was making to the company’s operations and policies.
Musk endured torrents of criticism from multiple directions over everything from his decision to lay off half the staff at the company, to his laxening of content moderation, allowing statements and topics which had previously been banned as hate speech or harassment to be posted on the site. He subsequently allowed previously banned accounts to return to the site, including former President Donald Trump, as well as a raft of previously banned conservative commentators and personalities.
More recently, he has released internal communications between Twitter staff and government officials to various reporters, who have turn the information into reports called, “The Twitter Files,” which detail the internal back and forth between government officials who wanted various materials and authors censored and removed from the site, and Twitter staff who were sometimes happy to oblige, and sometimes more reserved in response to the requests.
In response to the controversies, companies such as General Motors, Pfizer, United Airlines, Mondelez, Volkswagen, Chevrolet, Ford and Jeep suspended their ad campaigns on the site. At the time, Musk noted that the company was suffering from, “a massive drop in revenue,” and as a result was losing $4 million per day.
According to research firm Sensor Tower, the platform’s advertisers have been hesitant to return, with less than 25 of the top 100 advertisers on Twitter presently running ads on the platform.
Analysts note that given the majority of the social media company’s revenues come from online advertising, it is vitally important the platform convince advertisers to return. In 2021, the company pulled in $5.1 billion from advertisers, which comprised roughly 90% of the company’s total revenues.
