Dutch advertisers: Twitter "certainly not more attractive" after Musk's latest step

Twitter is "certainly not more attractive" due to Elon Musk's move to temporarily limit the number of tweets that Twitter users can read, said Henriette van Swinderen, the head of the Dutch advertisers' association, BvA. Large advertisers have recently spent only a limited part of their advertising budget on advertising via Twitter.

"Due to the limit, this will only decrease," she predicted, since companies typically want their advertisements to have more reach, not less. Large companies such as Unilever, Nestlé and ABN AMRO are members of the BvA.

Musk, who owns Twitter, announced on Saturday that Twitter is temporarily limiting the amount of tweets accounts can read each day. He claims that the purpose of the measure is to prevent data scraping by other parties.

Several marketing experts said the move could make it more difficult for the social media company to attract advertisers. Jasmine Enberg, a chief analyst at Insider Intelligence, even thinks the move could be "catastrophic" for Twitter's advertising business.

Since Musk took over the company last year, chaos has reigned at Twitter. Musk wants to make Twitter a bulwark of free speech. However, critics have expressed concern that hate speech can be spread more easily due to his intervention. The well-known billionaire claims he has also cut over 6,000 jobs at the company, bringing their total number of full-time employees to about a thousand.

Various Twitter advertisers have become more hesitant to use the platform in recent months because they do not like Musk's policies. "You don't want to run the risk of positioning your brand next to fake news," said Van Swinderen. However, it has no figures that can substantiate the withdrawal of advertisers.

The news about the reading restrictions was also considered a poor decision by many ordinary Twitter users. Last weekend they expressed their dissatisfaction on the platform with the hashtag #RIPTwitter. It is not yet known how long the limit will remain in effect.