Microsoft will remove Twitter from its advertising platform next week, nearly two months after Twitter announced it will start charging a minimum of $42,000 per month to users of its APIs, which include businesses and research institutions.
Users began receiving emails about their new pricing details in early March, according to a Wired report that noted at the time that the new pricing scheme “priced out almost every.”
With its $2.15 trillion market capitalization and roughly $100 billion in cash at the end of last year, Microsoft obviously has the money to pay Twitter what it wants, so the move appears to be a statement, even when Microsoft declines to provide further details about its decision.
Specifically, what he told his clients today is that, “Starting April 25, 2023, intelligent campaigns with cross-platform will no longer be supported on Twitter,” and that “Digital Marketing Center (DMC) will no longer be supported on Twitter.” Twitter starting April 25. , 2023.”
The moves mean users will no longer be able to access their Twitter account, nor create, schedule or manage tweets through Microsoft’s free social media management service.
As Mashable points out in a related reportbusinesses using Microsoft Advertising will still be able to manage and create content for Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn through the platform.
Unsurprisingly, Twitter owner Elon Musk finds the move galling, and even threatened on Twitter today to take legal action.
Apparently referring to Microsoft’s licensing agreement with the OpenAI AI team, which trained its powerful AI models on a “vast corpus of diverse text data from the Internet,” according to the popular OpenAI chatbot ChatGPT, Musk tweeted today about the decision. from Microsoft: “They trained illegally using data from Twitter. Time for trial.
There are reasons for some animosity between Microsoft and Twitter. In addition to reaching a license agreement with OpenAI, Microsoft has invested a lot of billions of dollars at OpenAI, which Musk co-founded in 2015 and left several years later. He has periodically has criticized it ever since, including on Twitter. He also announced more recently that he was planning a rival initiative.
Either way, the move comes at a bad time for Musk, who has been working more actively to win over advertisers after reportedly lose more than half following its acquisition of the platform at the end of October.
Just yesterday, he sat on stage in Miami with NBCUniversal’s president of global advertising and partnerships, supposedly saying during the interview that he is open to hearing legitimate concerns that advertisers may have about Twitter, but emphasizing that he won’t make changes he doesn’t believe in.
Meanwhile, there was some pressure on Twitter today about Musk’s decision to charge so much for access to the Twitter API by a entrepreneur with his own something checkered history — this individual noted that “in some cases” the move is killing traffic to Twitter from outside sources – Musk answered For him, “I’m open to ideas, but stealing the Twitter database, demonetizing it (removing ads), and then selling our data to others is not a winning solution.”