An angry decline for X
Welcome to an end of week update from Unmade. Today, more overnight news of a bumpy ride for the platform they used to call Twitter.
Plus, a day of red on the Unmade Index.
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What the X?
Tim Burrowes writes:
It sounds like it was a car crash.
I base it on the fact that Business Insider describes it as a car crash.
Overnight, the so-called CEO of Twitter, or X, as it is now, made her first proper public appearance since taking the helm back in May. By all accounts, Linda Yaccarino’s time on stage at the Code conference in the US did not go well.
I say so-called CEO, because owner Elon Musk is still perceived as taking most of the key decisions about the platform, including last week’s pronouncement that he plans to move to charging all users, not just its premium subscribers. That’s a switch which would likely halve again its declining advertising revenue.
For the most part, conference appearances are relatively anodyne affairs. They’re negotiated long in advance, and there are plenty of opportunities for the risk averse to decline before they end up on stage.
It sounds like Yaccarino had the sort of appearance which will be talked about for years.
The organisers of the conference, Vox Media, made a last minute addition to the program of Twitter’s former head of trust and safety Yoel Roth. After Roth resigned last year (without slamming the door), Musk nonetheless instituted a vicious online pile-on, insinuating that Roth condoned pedophilia.
Yaccarino – whose main job is to win back advertisers by persuading them that X can again be a safe place for brands to advertise – took her anger about Roth’s appearance with her onto the stage. As Vox’s Peter Kafka put it: “You’ll want to watch the video of this when it’s available to get the whole gestalt.”
(Edit: It’s now available. Yikes.)
Yoth of course talked about the danger Yaccarino’s boss had put him in. Not a particularly brand-friendly environment for advertisers.
So what of X’s brand health in Australia?
This week, consumer sentiment monitor Tracksuit released some new data. Based on a local sample of more than 5,000, it suggests the rebrand from Twitter to X has not gone well. Only 20% said they felt positive about the change compared to 32% who felt negative.
Tracksuit also asked which platforms consumers had used in the last year.
Most interesting was just how irrelevant Twitter / X has become to the most active demographic, which is 18-34.
Meta’s Instagram actually came top, with 76% of 18-34 year olds saying they’d used it in the year. That was ahead of sister platform Facebook’s 75%.
Next came TikTok with 55% reach in the demographic and Snapchat on 53%.
Twitter got a 29% score, while its rebranded version X got just 20%, behind even Reddit.
Among the total population, the numbers were similar. The main points of difference were Facebook still having the largest reach ahead of Instagram. And again, X was behind Reddit.
By any metrics, X is entering angry irrelevance.
Seven’s market cap falls back below half a billion as ARN drops to under a quarter
Seja Al Zaidi writes:
It was a poor day for every stock that moved on the Unmade Index yesterday – they all headed downwards. The Index dropped 0.74% to land at 625 points.
ARN Media had the most sizeable drop of 3.01%, taking its market capitalisation back to below a quarter of a billion dollars. Southern Cross Austereo fell 2.04%, dropping to well below $200m in market capitalisation.
IVE group fell 2.35%, and Seven saw a 1.61% fall that left it with a market capitalisation of just $466m.
It was also a particularly poor day for resource B2B publisher Aspermont, which fell 9.09%, to below $30m in market capitalisation.
Time to leave you to your Friday, and to the imminent long weekend.
We’ll be back with Best of the Week tomorrow.
Have a great day.
Toodlepip…
Tim Burrowes
Publisher – Unmade
tim@unmade.media
