Twitter Partners With Ad Verification Firms To Appease Advertisers

Twitter continues efforts to attract advertisers back to its platform, amid reports of a collapse in ad revenues.

Reuters reported that Twitter will team up with digital ad verification companies Integral Ad Science and DoubleVerify Holdings to provide advertisers tweet-level analysis on content appearing next to their ads.

Twitter management have reportedly been confronting a major issue ever since Elon Musk took control of the platform on 27 October, and restored suspended accounts and released a paid account verification that resulted in scammers impersonating corporations.

Ad revenues

Corporate advertisers fled in response to Musk’s botched relaunch of Twitter’s paid verification feature, that resulted in scammers impersonating companies on Twitter.

Fourteen of the top 30 advertisers on Twitter stopped all advertising on the platform after Musk took charge, according to the Pathmatics estimates.

Musk has previously blamed activist groups for pressuring advertisers to pull ads on the social media platform.

Last week the Information reported that a senior manager at Twitter had told the remaining staff that the company’s daily revenue on Tuesday 17 January was 40 percent lower than the same day a year ago.

And to make matters worse, during the staff meeting Siddharth Rao, an engineering manager overseeing the engineers working on Twitter’s ad business, reportedly told staff in a presentation that more than 500 of Twitter’s top advertisers have paused spending on Twitter since Elon Musk took over in October.

Advertising of course is Twitter’s main source of revenue, accounting for 90 percent of its $5.1bn turnover in 2021.

Then this week data from an advertising research firm Standard Media Index (SMI) showed that top advertisers are continuing to slash their spending on the platform after Elon Musk’s 27 October takeover.

According to the SMI data, ad spending on Twitter in November fell 55 percent from last year despite these months traditionally being a time of higher ad spending due to the holiday season.

Verification partnership

Now Reuters reported that IAS and DoubleVerify, who have both previously partnered with Twitter, use technology to independently verify that digital ads are viewed by real people.

Advertisers use the services to ensure the ads they pay for are seen by potential customers and not automated bots.

“Marketers are looking for confidence to continue to invest in Twitter and eventually grow their investment… and that is what this is all about,” Craig Ziegler, senior vice president, Product Management of Integral Ad Science was quoted by Reuters as saying.

IAS and DoubleVerify will also reportedly give advertisers measurement for brand safety, an industry term to protect its online reputation and evaluate content that is next to an ad at the tweet level.

Twitter lawsuit

Meanwhile the BBC has reported that two groups in Germany are suing Twitter over its alleged failure to remove six posts attacking Jewish people and denying the Holocaust, despite the offending posts being report.

The posts were reportedly published after Musk took control of the platform in October, and the offending tweets violate Twitter’s own terms and conditions.

“Twitter has betrayed our trust,” said Avital Grinberg, the president of the European Union of Jewish Students (EUJS), which has brought the civil action, alongside HateAid.

“By allowing hateful content to spread, the company fails to protect users – and Jews in particular,” Grinberg was quoted as saying.

The case will try to determine whether Twitter is contractually obliged to remove such material.

HateAid legal head Josephine Ballon reportedly said: “Twitter assures it won’t tolerate violence on its platform. Users have to be able to rely on that.”

Perhaps an explanation for Twitter’s alleged failure to remove the offending tweets came after CNBC reported (citing internal records), that Twitter has shed about 80 percent of its staff since Elon Musk took over.

It reported that Twitter’s headcount is now hovering at 1,300 active working employees.

Even worse, CNBC noted that Twitter now has fewer than 550 full-time engineers, and one former Twitter engineer reportedly said the remaining team will be spread thin, and will likely have a hard time maintaining the service while adding new features.

According to CNBC, Twitter’s trust and safety team, which makes policy recommendations, design and product changes with the aim of keeping all of Twitter’s users safe, is down to fewer than 20 full-time employees.

However Musk contradicted the internal records obtained by CNBC in a series of tweets, and claimed that Twitter now has about 2,300 full-time working employees and thousands of contractors.