by ALLUM BOKHARI at breitbart.com
Twitter’s advertising revenue dropped sharply in December 2022, with ad spending from top brands falling 71 percent compared to the same month in 2021.
The data, from Standard Media Index (SMI) data, comes as major corporations attempt to pressure Elon Musk’s Twitter over its restoration of prominent banned conservative accounts.
Data from the same source also found revenue fell by 55 percent in November 2022 compared to the same month in 2021.
Even before Musk began reinstating banned accounts, IPG, one of the world’s top advertising firms, advised its clients to “pause” advertising due to the potential for “unsafe behaviors” to proliferate on the platform.
The continued absence of ad revenue is a major problem for Twitter, which relied on ads for 89 percent of its $5.08 billion revenue in 2021. This is likely a major factor in the massive estimated reduction in Twitter’s value.
Advertising boycotts form a key lynchpin of the online censorship machine. Corporations, usually driven by negative media coverage, have used their economic clout many times in the past to pressure social media platforms to adopt ever-stricter censorship policies.
Prominent examples include the “adpocalypse” on Google-owned YouTube in 2017, when a media-led panic about ads appearing next to extremist content cost the tech platform hundreds of millions of dollars, causing it to clamp down on monetization for independent creators.