Ex-employee punches holes in Elon Musk’s latest Twitter theory

New Delhi:

Elon Musk’s latest claim that Twitter is the massive driver of clicks to other sites on the Internet has been met with widespread opposition and ridicule by many users, including a former employee of the social media company.

Musk, who acquired Twitter last month, noted that the platform was the largest source of referrals.

He said in response to an exchange referring to how Twitter is “attracting a few clicks”:

Twitter transfers a huge number of clicks to other websites/apps. The biggest click driver on the internet to date.

– Elon Musk November 13, 2022

Claire Diaz-Ortiz, a former Twitter employee, denied the billionaire’s claim, calling it “100 percent wrong.”

“Lies. I’ve been on Twitter for 5+ years and written 2 books on social media. This is 100% wrong and Twitter knows it. We never sold it on clicks, bc it’s much lower on traffic than FB, LI etc. Twitter has other major strengths.

lies. I worked @Twitter 5 years + wrote 2 books on social media mktg. THIS 💯 FALSE & @Twitter knows that. We never sell them on clicks, bc they are much lower in traffic than FB, LI etc. Twitter has other major strengths. (&mrkting is more than just clicks 😉 https://t.co/ie3ZZT3q7E

– Claire Diaz Ortiz (Claire) November 13, 2022

Another user, product developer Tom Coats, dismissed Musk’s statement as an “embarrassing mistake”.

This is just a social media list from Statcounter for example. These are *just* social media sites. Twitter is not even 10% of them! pic.twitter.com/W1RWkUNTL8

– Tom Coates (@tomcoates) November 13, 2022

He wrote on Twitter: “100% wrong. Embarrassing mistake. I mean even if search engines ignore it, it’s wrong. I can feel your ad managers and partnerships (if anything) rocking the more you write.”

He even participated in a study that showed that at 74.1 percent, Facebook was the main generator of traffic to other websites, far ahead of Twitter’s 7.73 percent.

Elon Musk, who has been looking for ways to make Twitter profitable, on Thursday raised the possibility of the social media platform going bankrupt, two weeks after buying it for $44 billion.

He also warned that Twitter would not be able to “survive the next economic downturn” if it failed to increase subscription revenue to offset declining advertising income, according to reports/

After taking office on October 27, Musk moved into a clean house and said the company was losing more than $4 million a day, in large part because advertisers started fleeing as soon as he took office.

Twitter has $13 billion in debt after the deal and faces interest payments totaling nearly $1.2 billion in the next 12 months. The payments exceeded the cash flow recently revealed on Twitter, which reached $1.1 billion at the end of June.

It’s also started charging an $8 per month fee for Twitter Blue which will include a blue check before being paused on Friday. Today, he said, he will likely “come back next week”.