Mark Reid, CEO of WPP, the world’s largest advertising communication group, said in an interview on Wednesday that Musk’s plan for Twitter may improve the company’s service, which is subject to WPP customers. However, he doesn’t think Musk will cut off Twitter’s ad revenue stream.
“There’s no question that Twitter can be a much more powerful product,” Reid said. “Many of the ideas that Musk came up with about fake bots, improving algorithms, and improving the customer experience have implications for the platform, for users, and for our customers. It’s all great.”
Regarding Musk’s plans to reduce Twitter’s reliance on advertising, Reid said any potential crackdown on the advertising business would hurt Twitter more than WPP. However, he doesn’t think Musk will cut off advertising revenue. “I don’t think he spent $44 billion buying a company to actually cut off its revenue stream,” Reid said.
Before agreeing to buy Twitter on Monday, Musk had said he did not expect to make a profit from the acquisition. “It’s not a way to make money,” Musk told a TED conference on April 14, insisting that his interest in Twitter was purely good-natured. “I don’t care about the economy.”
Gizchina News of the week
Twitter will make some changes
Musk has talked about restricting advertising on Twitter, opening up the site’s content algorithms to public scrutiny, and trying to “authenticate all real people” to distinguish bots from legitimate accounts. Musk also said he wants to make the platform a bastion of free speech and remove the guardrails of content moderation.
Some advertisers have warned that this could scare away brands worried about their ads appearing near controversial tweets. Financial analysts also claim the weakened review could put Twitter ad revenue at risk.
“There are undoubtedly some people who will be concerned about the content on the platform,” Reid said. “This treatment may or may not work, and we’ll see.”
One of the changes coming after Elon Musk’s shares acquisition is the new Edit button. However, we’re pretty sure that more changes are coming. At the moment, the exact future of social media is unclear, but we expect a major overhaul. This is a whole new area for Musk, after all, his companies, Tesla and SpaceX are successful. This is interesting because they are in completely different segments.
“I want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features. Making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating spambots, and authenticating all humans.”- Elon Musk
According to the deal details, the stockholders will receive around $54,20 in cash for each share. That basically stands as a 38 per cent prize over Twitter’s papers on April 1. Shortly after the announcement, Twitter’s stocks are up by 6%.
