Twitter’s advertising losses are piling up

Revenues are in free fall, employees say. Can Musk turn the tide?

Twitter’s advertising losses are piling up
“Cartoon blue bird wearing a parachute” / DALL-E

On Monday morning, a revenue analyst for Twitter in Europe shared some disheartening news. “We are seeing a significant decline in bookings,” the analyst posted in Slack, before sharing the numbers. Twitter’s ad revenue in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) is down 15 percent year over year, he said, and weekly bookings are down 49 percent, according to screenshots shared with Platformer.

It was a grim update to an already dire set of forecasts. On October 31, in a Google Sheet created to track advertisers who had paused their campaigns amidst Elon Musk’s chaotic takeover of the company, analysts found that $15.7 million in EMEA revenue was already at risk. That included $12 million of anticipated losses in the United Kingdom, the company’s largest market in the region.

The losses come at a critical period for Twitter, which has been counting on the confluence of Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the ongoing World Cup to drive increases in quarterly revenue. “It’s catastrophic,” one former Twitter executive told us.