A new report says that just a few of Twitter’s most well-known users make the company millions of dollars. A new study from the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) says that just 10 accounts that were once banned from Twitter will bring in “up to $19 million a year in advertising revenue.”
The report looked at how 10 accounts that had been banned for “publishing hateful content and dangerous conspiracies” were being used now. After Elon Musk took over Twitter, the accounts were turned back on. Some of the well-known accounts in the group are linked to extremism and conspiracy theories, such as those of Andrew Tate, the founder of the Daily Stormer, Andrew Anglin, Robert Malone, a well-known anti-vaccine activist, and the Gateway Pundit.
CCDH looked at nearly 10,000 tweets from these accounts over 47 days in December and January to figure out how many people saw them and how much they were used. “Tweets from the ten accounts got a total of 54 million impressions on an average day,” they write, based on what they found out from their analysis. “If you take this average and multiply it by 365 days, you can expect the accounts to get nearly 20 billion impressions in a year.”
CCDH says it made three new Twitter accounts that only followed the 10 users named in the report so it could figure out how much money those ad impressions could make for Twitter. About one ad showed up for every 6.7 tweets, the authors found. Then, using data from analytics firm Brandwatch, which says that “Twitter ads cost an average of $6.46 per 1,000 impressions,” CCDH came up with “a total of up to $19 million in estimated annual ad revenue across all accounts.”
Even though the estimates don’t show exactly how much Twitter might be making from these users, they do show how valuable a small number of very controversial accounts can be for the platform. It also shows how much more Twitter has to gain by letting even more controversial users come back.
All of the accounts named in the report were once permanently banned from Twitter, but they were all brought back after Musk said he would offer “general amnesty” to users who hadn’t broken the law. Twitter also recently said that it wants to let even more people who have been banned in the past appeal their bans.
At the same time, since Musk took over, Twitter’s advertising business has taken a big hit. Platformer says that a number of well-known advertisers have left the platform and that revenue has dropped by as much as 40 percent.
The report also mentions a few times when ads from well-known companies showed up next to offensive and upsetting posts from users. For example, a Prime Video ad was placed right under a tweet from Andrew Anglin that said, “Prostitution is the only job a woman is qualified for on her own.” The report also talks about an NFL ad that was right next to a tweet with false information about COVID-19 vaccines.
