But Twitter’s co-founder and at least some investors who joined Mr. Musk’s bid have rejected the need for advertising and insisted that the company needs to break away from it. Twitter’s status as “a public company solely reliant on the advertising business model” added to its problems with bots, abuse and censorship, said Ben Horowitz, a general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, which is investing $400 million in the effort to take Twitter private.
Jack Dorsey, the company’s co-founder, agreed. “This is true. It needs cover for a while,” Mr. Dorsey said in a tweet responding to Mr. Horowitz.
Advertisers said such a shift would hurt Twitter. “At the end of the day, it’s not the brands who need to be concerned because they’ll just spend their budgets elsewhere — it’s Twitter that needs to be concerned,” said David Jones, a longtime advertising executive and the chief executive of the Brandtech Group, a marketing technology company. “If you said to me that TikTok went away, that would be a disaster. But Twitter going away? Yeah, whatever.”
Right after Mr. Musk reached a deal to buy Twitter early last week, the company’s executives began reaching out to advertising clients, according to regulatory filings and several people who received the messages. The executives emailed assurances that business would proceed as usual and that the lines of communication would remain open. Brand safety, they said, remained a “priority.”
Twitter representatives have also noted that it would probably be months, if not more than a year, before any serious changes would go into effect, advertising executives said.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/05/business/media/elon-musk-twitter-ads.html
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