Twitter: Limiting tweets could hurt CEO, says analyst – 7/3/2023 – Tech

Elon Musk’s decision to temporarily limit the number of tweets Twitter users can read on the platform could undermine new chief executive Linda Yaccarino’s efforts to attract advertisers, marketers said.

Musk announced on Saturday (1st) that Twitter would limit how many tweets per day various accounts can read, to discourage “extreme levels” of data collection and manipulation of the system.

Users posted screenshots in response showing that they were unable to see any tweets, including tweets on corporate advertiser pages, after reaching the threshold.

Advertising industry veterans said the move creates a hurdle for Yaccarino, the former head of advertising at NBCUniversal, who started last month as chief executive of Twitter.

Yaccarino has been looking to re-establish relationships with advertisers who left the site following Musk’s takeover of the platform last year, as reported by the Financial Times last week.

The limits are “remarkably bad” for users and advertisers who are already shaken by the “chaos” Musk has brought to the platform, Mike Proulx, director of research at Forrester, said on Sunday.

“The deficit in advertiser trust that Linda Yaccarino needs to reverse has grown even larger. And it cannot be reversed on the basis of her credibility in the industry alone,” he said.

Lou Paskalis, founder of advertising consultancy AJL Advisory and a former chief marketing officer at Bank of America, said Yaccarino is Musk’s “last hope” to recoup advertising revenue and company value.

“This action signals to the market that it is not able to enable it to save it from itself,” he said.

Under the new limit, unverified accounts were initially limited to 600 posts per day; and new, unverified accounts limited to 300. Verified accounts can read 6,000 tweets a day, Musk said on the platform.

Hours later, he said the limit had been raised to 10,000 posts a day for verified users, 1,000 a day for unverified users and 500 a day for new unverified users.

A Twitter spokesperson did not comment or respond to questions about how long the restrictions will last.

Limiting how much users can view could be “catastrophic” for the platform’s advertising business, said Jasmine Enberg, an analyst at Insider Intelligence.

“It’s certainly not going to make it any easier to convince advertisers to come back. It’s hard enough to convince them to come back,” she said.