Twitter owner Elon Musk has said that the social media platform he bought for 44 billion dollars last October has lost roughly half of its advertising revenue.
According to Twitter, the negative cash flow of the platform was due to the loss of about half of the advertising revenue since he purchased the platform last October.
Musk made this revelation in a tweet in response to a user giving suggestions on financing for the platform on Saturday.
The billionaire businessman, said, “We’re still in negative cash flow, due to 50% drop in advertising revenue plus heavy debt load.
“Need to reach positive cash flow before we have the luxury of anything else.”
Insider Intelligence reported that Twitter was set to earn less than $3 billion in revenue in 2023, down one-third from 2022.
Changes instituted by Musk since his takeover of Twitter have turned off users and advertisers alike.
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Recall that earlier this month, Musk announced that Twitter was limiting verified accounts to reading 10,000 tweets a day, in a bid “to address extreme levels of data scraping” and “system manipulation” by third-party platforms.
Non-verified users, the free accounts that make up the majority of users are limited to reading 1,000 tweets per day, while new unverified accounts are limited to 500 tweets.
Twitter has also said TweetDeck, a popular program that allows users to monitor several accounts at once, will only be available to verified users from next month.
The changes came as Threads, an app launched by Facebook parent Meta as a rival to Twitter, registered more than 100 million users in its first five days.
Earlier this year, the artificial intelligence app ChatGPT, created by OpenAI, took two months to reach the same number of active users.
According to some estimates, Threads has now reached 150 million users, with India leading the way, boosted by its link to Instagram which gives it a built-in audience of more than two billion users and spares the platform the challenge of starting from scratch.
Twitter is thought to have around 200 million regular users but it has suffered repeated technical failures since Musk bought the platform and sacked thousands of staff.
Many have expressed privacy concerns over Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s new platform, which asks users to give Meta permission to track them closely across the internet.
