Balmain: Musk will likely make concessions to appease Twitter advertisers
Simon Balmain · Elon Musk Laid Me Off At Twitter: Simon Balmain · Nov 9, 2022 · at 27:23
Simon Balmain, former Twitter senior community manager, assesses the commercial pressure facing Elon Musk following advertiser departures post-acquisition.
0:00 / 0:21exact quote · 21.2s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“It's potentially quite likely that concessions will have to be made by him in order to, you know appease brand advertisers in, in certain ways that some of these people who were very jubilant and joyful about this might have a very quick turn of heart about those decisions.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Simon Balmain
Balmain lost laptop, Slack, and Gmail access an hour after layoff email
“Within the email kind of said, yeah, there's good, there's gonna be this huge reduction in, in head count. You will, if you're affected, you'll get an email to your personal email. And if not, you'll get something to your work email. And it was within an hour …”
Twitter employees learned of internal company moves from reporters on Twitter
“On pretty much on platform, following the news, following, yeah, following, you know, following the resources of deep diving investigators like, you know, Casey Newtons and people like that. Yeah, we're finding out a lot of stuff at the same time everybody els…”
Mass layoffs will degrade Twitter's manual, non-AI content moderation, Balmain warns
“Content moderation is, it's not AI driven, right? It's not machine learning. It's, you know, there's elements of that to it, like anything in tech, but it's a manual job that real people are doing. And if you're laying off people that do that, then stuff's not…”
Jack Dorsey was an active participant in Elon Musk's Twitter takeover
“Jack is, is certainly not an innocent bystander in, in this turn of events. He's, you know, a very active participant in this turn of events even having not been at the company for, you know, a year and not been on the board since I think May is when he steppe…”
Twitter's direct user revenue will not offset falling advertising spend
“Not confident that a push on direct revenue products via users will pick up at the same pace that ad revenue may drop.”
Balmain: Musk's firing of Twitter executives made sweeping layoffs clearly inevitable
“When I think the real mood shift came On the day that, you know, the deal was closed and he, you know, showed up at the office and fired all the executives. Right. You know, these are incredible people that, that, you know, most people in the company have had …”