Twitter’s ad revenue dropped 50%, Elon Musk said

Twitter’s ad revenue has plummeted 50%, Elon Musk tweeted over the weekend.

In the tweet, a response to a user suggesting he should create a consortium to help finance Twitter, Musk said the ad revenue drop is contributing to negative cash flow for the company. He also tweeted that while advertising revenue in June did not meet expectations, “July is a bit more promising.” The prediction comes after Musk originally said the company could attain positive cash flow by June.

Twitter’s troubles are being exacerbated by Threads, its new rival from Meta, according to Joseph Rothstein, founder and CEO of digital marketing agency Social Media 55.

“It’s going to impact Twitter’s ad potential, because the moment the Meta platform ignites the ads platform for Threads…it will be a recipe for success [for] Threads and I think it will be an additional challenge that Twitter is going to face,” he told us.

While Threads may not offer official advertising at the moment, it will bring Instagram’s branded content tools to the app soon, according to Axios. Last week, creator Adam Rose posted a thread promoting the show Futurama with the hashtag #HuluPartner, which Ad Age said is “being called the first sponsored Thread.”

The app will unveil a slew of other features as well, according to Lia Haberman, a social media and influencer marketing professor with UCLA Extension. In her newsletter, Haberman said a “Threads brand deck being sent to partners” outlines plans for features including compatibility with social network Mastodon, improved search, and messaging.

It remains to be seen how Threads will fare in the coming weeks, however. According to CNBC, the time users spent on the app dropped 50% in its second week of operation, despite clocking 100 million users in its first week online.

Threads is just the latest of Twitter’s troubles. Since Musk purchased the platform last fall, many advertisers have jumped ship amid content moderation concerns, an issue further accentuated when former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson debuted his show on Twitter. Musk handed over the reins to former NBCU ad sales chief Linda Yaccarino in May, naming her CEO in what many saw as a move to  bolster Twitter’s ad revenue.

However, Rothstein said platforms like Threads could be the final nail in the coffin for Twitter.

“I thought that [Twitter] would never fail. I now think that it’s very plausible that they don’t succeed. Because there are other options that people just might permanently shift toward.”