LinkedIn emerged victorious in a nearly six-year-old lawsuit against hiQ Labs for data scraping.

In meetings with agency and brand leadership this week, Elon Musk, Twitter’s new owner, has been receptive to concerns about hate speech on the platform while also generally eluding pressing questions about the platform’s future, sources told Adweek.

“Honestly, he seemed a bit all over the place,” said a media buying executive at a large CPG brand, who attended a meeting earlier this week between the company and several brands. The source added that Musk did not answer several questions about his plans for advertising on the platform, including whether tobacco ads would be permissible. 

A second media buyer, who works at a large agency, said a second meeting with the company has been set up to answer more detailed questions that Musk wasn’t able to answer during a meeting earlier in the week.

“He was an active participant and actively listening to concerns of agency leadership about brand safety and what that means for the clients,” said the buyer. “We’re looking for a signal in a lot of noise,” the source said. 

Brands are trying to weigh private conversations with Musk, which have often lacked detail but been respectful, with his public presence on Twitter, where he has been critical of the advertising community. This morning, he tweeted that revenue at Twitter was down because of “activist groups” adding, “we did everything we could to appease advertisers.”

Despite this proclamation, estimates from data analytics firm Pathmatics show Twitter’s U.S. ad revenue has barely budged since Musk’s acquisition. During the first four days of this week, brands spent around $20.29 million on the platform compared to $20.3 million the first four days of last week.

Ebiquity, an ad-tech firm that monitors media spend, told Adweek that nine out of 17 brand advertisers they have contacted this week have instructed their agencies to suspend advertising on Twitter until further notice. Although the company didn’t share the specific brands, some of its clients include Sony, Nestle, Subway and Mazda. 

Some big names have indeed paused spend, including General Mills. But others are still waiting. Our media buyer source says none of their clients are off the platform. Reflecting this reality, CPMs on the platform have not fluctuated dramatically, Avi Ben Zvi, vp of paid social at performance marketing agency Tinuiti said. 

“Until something tangibly, concretely changes, there are a lot of advertisers that are waiting or operating business as usual,” the media buyer source said. 

Adweek contacted Twitter for comment Friday morning, but our emails to a spokesperson bounced back, which may be the result of widespread layoffs. An email to the company Friday afternoon was not returned.

Brands pull eight figures in annual revenue 

A third media buyer source at a large brand said the channel had been a strong performer.

Even before Musk took over and hate speech rapidly increased on the platform, Twitter had struggled with preventing harmful and illegal content, some of it adjacent to ads. In late September, several brands found out they had been inadvertently advertising on accounts peddling child porn, per a report in Reuters. One of those brands, which spends more than $15 million on Twitter, subsequently paused spend on the platform, the third media buyer told Adweek.

The brand was considering returning to the platform recently and had scheduled a meeting this week with the company. But then Twitter abruptly canceled the meeting, souring relations. 

“They just realized all of this was happening and [had] nothing to say,” the source said. 

After this week, with hate speech increasing on the platform and Elon Musk tweeting (and then deleting) an inaccurate story about the attack of Paul Pelosi, the brand isn’t planning to return any time soon.

“It’s a long road of fundamentally making us understand that [Musk] understands what we need from a brand safety standpoint,” the buyer said. “I have zero confidence in that right now.”

The media buying executive from the CPG company also stopped ad spend on Twitter due to a similar incident that also happened a month ago during which ads ran adjacent to predatory accounts. The company’s media spend on Twitter is more than $10 million annually. It’s now shifting budgets to CTV and TikTok.

The company had plans to advertise on Twitter for the upcoming Super Bowl, as it had done in past years, but that’s no longer the case, the source said. 

“Our brand is our most valuable asset, we would not and cannot have them be associated with content that would be hateful or vulgar,” the source said.

LISBON—Code and Theory founder Dan Gardner and Social Media Week founder and chair Toby Daniels, a former Adweek employee, are launching a media company with 28 other founders next year called ON_Discourse.

Together, the founders make up a decentralized autonomous organization, called a DAO. DAOs have no central authority and, as a result, ON_Discourse members all have a stake in the company. Over the last year, the DAO met to discuss and debate emerging technologies’ impact on business. The group hatched a plan to launch ON_Discourse and publish curated, opinionated content for technology-focused business leaders.

The founders predict that readers will value peer-authored insights written to help technologists navigate the complex choices they need to make as emerging tech concepts like Web3 continue to capture the tech industry’s attention. These articles may have headlines such as “Why is no one asking, ‘why blockchain?’” and “Do DAOs suck?”

“The point of those examples is to show that it’s a challenge to the norm of what is being discussed. And the reason we’re able to get these types of topics [is] because we’re in it, building these businesses,” Gardner told Adweek.

At Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal, Gardner announced the news on the PandaConf stage, where marketers coalesce to watch programming centered around advertising, marketing and its intersection with tech. Gardner believes the publication will fill the role of the all-but-extinct town square. Social media platforms like Twitter, which are theoretically designed to enable discourse, are criticized for stirring up conflict and often referred to as “echo chambers.”

Don’t expect coverage on the ‘next shiny object’

The new publisher wants to help its future readers understand technology’s risks and opportunities. It’s not a news platform, per se, and wants to focus on demystifying complex concepts for readers and offering insights that will influence business decisions.

Current ON_Discourse members hail from varied backgrounds and include DeShone Kizer, former NFL quarterback and founder of One of None, Raashi Rosenberger, head of brand at Meta Quest (formerly Oculus), and Matthew Sweezey, co-founder of Web3 Labs at Salesforce.

Discourse can “broaden perspective, because you’re actually challenging ideas,” Gardner said. “And it can really bring people together.” It flourishes in business environments, said the leader, noting the media landscape fails to reflect that and has become too friendly and palatable. Gardner fears that people automatically view authors—whether they be journalists, bylined executives or anyone else with a platform—”experts” in diagnosing technology trends despite most having no or limited business leadership experience.

Daniels feels similarly.

“Much of the content that’s out there is either written in a way that is designed to promote the next shiny object in technology, or written by people who have not got the decades of experience in building businesses that we think is necessary to be able to put out deep perspectives on really important topics,” Daniels told Adweek.

A membership-driven model that doesn’t yearn for clicks

The publication will not gate its content and will instead derive its revenue from members, who pay for the opportunity to engage in, well, discourse.

“We’re intentionally an incredibly small and highly curated group of people,” Daniels told Adweek.

Daniels declined to disclose membership costs, but confirmed there will be membership tiers that offer different benefits. Prospective members can apply to join when applications become available later this month. For now, founders urge them to sign up for its Daily Discourse newsletter to receive updates on when its membership waitlist will open up.

This isn’t to say that ON_Discourse will eschew digital advertising. It won’t. But it’s not necessarily chasing ad dollars. Instead, it’s focused on adding members that it can engage in conversation. Members will either write, or work with ghostwriters to write, the ON_Discourse content. Those members stand to benefit if ON_Discourse becomes a thought leadership conduit that can elevate their perspectives and expertise while veering far away from publishing the so-called “marketing speak” that fatigues readers.

“We don’t want to chase ‘eyeballs,’” Gardner told Adweek. “We want to chase ‘meaningful’ eyeballs.”

Twitter has begun making layoffs, which are set to impact half of its staff globally, with all offices temporarily closed and emails sent to personal addresses of those who are to leave the company.

Since Elon Musk’s $44 billion takeover of the micro-messaging platform was confirmed last week, there have been questions about what policy changes would come, his strategy for the business and what those would mean for advertisers, several of who are already reducing or halting their ad spend on the platform due to uncertainty and a rise in hate speech. Musk’s first major change, however, is to cut the platform’s headcount, currently more than 7,000 staffers, by half.

That process began on the morning of Friday, November 4, through a memo sent to all staff explaining the process of reducing its global headcount.

“This action is unfortunately necessary to ensure the company’s success moving forward,” the memo signed “Twitter” explained.

The memo explained that by 9:00 a.m. Pacific Time Zone all staff members will have received notification through their Twitter email if they still have a job.

In the early hours of Friday morning, staff members from around the world were using the platform to share the news that they were one of those chosen to depart through the hashtag #lovehwhereyouworked.

Included among the thousands to reveal their enforced departures using the hashtag #lovewhereyouworked were Jonathan Taylor, head of global strategy and innovation and James Glynn, senior curation lead on News, both based in London. Others include Yash Agarwal, a public policy association and Helen Zhang, communications manager, both based in Singapore.

One of the early executives to leave following Musk’s takeover was concluded was its chief customer officer Sarah Personette, who resigned last Friday and was the platform’s key liaison with advertisers.

Global social media business We Are Social’s U.K. chief executive Jim Coleman described the timing of the cuts as “awful” but suggested it might be what Twitter needs in the long-term.

“The timing, in terms of the World Cup, the U.S. midterms, Cop27 and Christmas, it’s really bizarre that he would do it now, and it feels like the wrong time to do it,” Coleman said. “From an advertiser’s perspective, it’s all about waiting and seeing. There has been no policy change yet, there is just the hint of policy change coming.”

Coleman highlighted the increase in “horrible content” and racist language use that had been reported since Musk’s takeover, an environment advertisers would not want to be associated with. Twitter’s head of safety and integrity Yoel Roth shared that there had been a “surge of hateful content” and that 1,500 accounts had been removed in recent days.

As a result of the rise in hate speech, recorded brands such as General Mills, L’Oreal, Pfizer and General Motors have paused their spend on the platform.

“If you’re in a situation where your ads are turning up next to some of this hateful content you have no choice but to remove them,” Coleman said, adding that advertisers and media buyers were waiting to see what happens with new policies being introduced and a potential subscription strategy on the way which would “make it a better business.”  Coleman added that if Twitter were to introduce a subscription model it would likely become a more brand safe and appealing place for advertisers in the long run.

In July, Twitter reported a decline in its revenue of $1.18 billion for its second quarter, down from $1.19 billion in 2021 earnings, which it blamed on its legal wrangling with Musk during the protracted takeover, which he attempted to pull out of. Macroeconmic headwinds have weighted heavily on tech ad revenues. And while Twitter relies on the vast majority of its revenues from advertisers, the platform is only anticipated to make up 4% of U.S. ad spend this year, per Insider Intelligence. The platform has fallen in its significance to advertisers.

Jake Dubbins, Co-chair of the Conscious Advertising Network and managing director of Media Bounty was damning of the situation and questioned how the platform could retain its membership within the Global Alliance for Responsible Media following recent developments.

“The way people have been treated at Twitter is appalling. Notified on email if you still have a job? A fitting testament to modern day predatory capitalism,” stated Dubbins, questioning the integrity of the platform under its new owner. “Even though content moderation policies have not changed yet, how can Twitter hope to enforce them with such devastating cuts in staff?”

Snap Inc. teamed up with fitness tracking application Strava on the Strava Activity Lens, an augmented reality experience that enables users of Snapchat and Strava to share their fitness journey with family and friends via the former’s camera.

TikTok entered a partnership with DoubleVerify last September to measure viewability and invalid traffic, and the two companies revealed Thursday that the agreement was expanded to include post-campaign brand safety and suitability measurement for advertisers.

Communities are coming to WhatsApp worldwide, after initially being introduced in April, and the feature joins several updates to groups on the Meta-owned messaging application.

Elon Musk’s first few days as “Chief Twit” have not gone over well with justice organizations and media watchdog groups.

Brands and agencies are currently mulling whether advertising on Twitter is still worth the potential brand safety risks that come from the new ownership of Elon Musk, a self-described “free speech absolutist.”