Microsoft kicks Twitter in the teeth

Microsoft is removing Twitter from its advertising platform next week, nearly two months after Twitter announced it would begin charging a minimum of $42,000 per month to users of its API, which include companies and institutes of research.

Users began receiving emails about its new pricing details in early March, according to a Wired report which observed at the time that the new pricing scheme is “killing almost everyone.”

With its market cap of $2.15 trillion 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 decision seems like a bit a statement, though Microsoft declines to elaborate on its decision.

Specifically, what he told his clients today is that “starting April 25, 2023, Smart Campaigns with Cross-Platform will no longer support Twitter” and that “the Digital Marketing Center ( DMC) will no longer support Twitter starting April 25, 2023.”

These changes mean that users will no longer be able to access their Twitter account, or create, schedule, or otherwise manage tweets through Microsoft’s free social media management service.

As Mashable notes in a related report, businesses that use 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 decision infuriating, even threatening on Twitter today to take legal action.

Seemingly referring to Microsoft’s licensing deal with AI firm OpenAI – which trained its powerful AI models on a “vast body of diverse textual data from across the internet”, according to popular chatbot OpenAI ChatGPT – Musk today tweeted Microsoft’s decision, “They trained illegally using Twitter data. Time for trial.

There are reasons for some animosity between Microsoft and Twitter. In addition to entering into a licensing agreement with OpenAI, Microsoft invested several billion dollars in OpenAI, which Musk co-founded in 2015 and left several years later. He has regularly criticized it since, including on Twitter. He also announced more recently that he was planning a rival initiative.

Either way, the move comes at a difficult time for Musk, who has worked more actively to win over advertisers after losing more than half of Twitter’s top 1,000 advertisers following its takeover of the platform in late October. .

Just yesterday, he sat on stage in Miami with the president of global advertising and partnerships at NBCUniversal, reportedly saying during the interview that he was ready to hear legitimate concerns that advertisers might have about Twitter, but stressing that he wouldn’t make changes he doesn’t believe. In.

Meanwhile, pushed on Twitter today about Musk’s decision to charge so much for Twitter API access by a entrepreneur with its own somewhat checkered history – this individual noted that “in some cases” this decision kills traffic to Twitter from outside sources – Musk replied for him, “I’m open to ideas, but scamming the Twitter database, demonetizing it (removing ads) and then selling our data to others is not a winning solution.”