Twitter Europe Ad Revenue Plummets 15%, Weekly Bookings Down 49%: Report

Twitter’s popularity among European advertisers has dwindled this year, a new report revealed, just as CEO Elon Musk wages war against Apple over the alleged threat to block the troubled social media platform from the App Store.

“We are seeing a significant decline in bookings,” a revenue analyst for Twitter Europe revealed Monday in Slack communications, as per screenshots shared with Platformer and reported by the outlet Tuesday.

The revenue analyst reportedly said that Twitter’s ad revenue in the continent, the Middle East and Africa slumped by 15% year over year. Furthermore, weekly bookings plunged by 49% in key markets, Platformer reported.

“It’s catastrophic,” a former Twitter executive told the outlet.

Even before the news about the platform’s advertising revenue in Europe came to light, Twitter was reportedly already anticipating losses of up to $12 million in the United Kingdom alone. The U.K. is Twitter’s largest market in Europe.

News of the significant slump in weekly advertising bookings came days after non-profit media watchdog group Media Matters for America revealed in a new report that 50 of Twitter’s top 100 advertisers have either declared or seemingly halted advertising on the platform. The said brands have spent nearly $2 billion in advertising on Twitter since 2020, the report stated.

Chevrolet, Chipotle Mexican Grill, Inc., Ford, Jeep, Kyndryl and Novartis AG were among the companies that announced they will no longer advertise on Twitter, according to Media Matters report.

The other companies on the list were labeled by the organization as “quiet quitters,” including Abbott Laboratories, American Express Company, AT&T, Boston Beer Company, Chanel, Citigroup, Dell, Heineken N.V., Marriott International, Inc., Kellogg Company, LinkedIn Corporation and more.

In what could be the biggest clash of tech titans this year, Musk revealed Monday that Apple has “threatened to withhold Twitter from its App Store, but won’t tell us why.”

The Tesla CEO also said the iPhone maker “has mostly stopped advertising on Twitter.”

Over the weekend, the Financial Times reported that Musk personally called the executives of companies that stopped advertising on Twitter to question them about their decisions.

“It is quite unique. The turmoil, the damage, nothing of this magnitude has happened before,” an advertising agency executive told the outlet about the reported campaign-related delays and issues as a result of fewer employees remaining following Musk’s Twitter worker purge and the mass exodus that followed.

It is unclear if the SpaceX founder was able to reclaim some of Twitter’s advertisers who halted business with the platform, but some observers noted that advertisers in search of alternatives to Twitter may encounter problems.

For instance, the emerging Twitter alternative Mastodon doesn’t support advertising, the Fortune Magazine reported.

Amid the exodus of advertisers on Twitter, Musk has floated several ideas to get the social media platform off of its advertising-centric revenue system as he announced the Twitter Blue paid subscription service.

The tech mogul has also told employees that he sees Twitter’s future as “the people’s financial institution,” somehow similar to Chinese tech giant Tencent’s WeChat app.