Microsoft Drops Twitter As Its Advertising Platform

Things seem to have gone downhill for Twitter again as Microsoft announced that it's planning to drop Twitter as its advertising platform next week. While Microsoft has refused to give any statement regarding the sudden change, it might be a consequence of Twitter charging $42000 from its API users. Just two months ago, Twitter announced that it's no longer going to offer the API service for free.

The minimum price for API users was set at $42000, which included researchers and enterprises.

Now, Microsoft has a market capitalization of $2.15 trillion, and reports suggest that it clearly had about $ 100 billion liquid cash in hand at the end of 2022. This means that it definitely has the money to pay for Twitter's API service, but for some reason, it doesn't want to.

All that we know so far is Microsoft announced to its customers that Starting on April 25, 2023, Smart Campaigns with Multi-platform will no longer support Twitter,"

Even the Digital Marketing Center (DMC) would not support Twitter starting from April 25, 2023.

In simple terms, this move means that customers who use Microsoft's free social media management tool will no longer be able to access their Twitter account through the platform to create new tweets, schedule posts, or even manage the engagement to their tweets in any way.

It's important to note that this ban is only imposed on Twitter. As for other social media platforms such as Instagram and Facebook, all users will be able to manage their social media content on them as usual.

What Does Elon Musk Have To Say About This Move?

It's no surprise that Elon Musk is quite unhappy with the turn of events, so much so that he threatened Microsoft on Twitter today with plans to take legal action.

According to Musk, the licensing agreement between Microsoft and OpenAI reveals that all powered AI models of OpenAI, including the famous ChatGPT, were trained using a vast corpus of diverse text data from the internet," - as written in the agreement.

They trained illegally using Twitter data. Lawsuit time.Elon Musk

Another reason for the beef between Microsoft and Twitter is their mutual connection to OpenAI. Microsoft has recently joined hands with OpenAI to bring ChatGPT-like features to Bing. Under the same agreement, Microsoft has also invested billions in OpenAI to develop more powerful AI models.

The lawsuit against Microsoft might also be a way to attack OpenAI.

On the other hand, Elon Musk, who co-founded OpenAI and left a few later, has constantly bashed the company ever since. He's also on his way to building an AI company to compete with OpenAI.

Regardless of how this case unfolds, Microsoft undoubtedly picked the worst time for this massive blow. Since the last few months, Musk has been desperately trying to win back advertising partners after Twitter lost its top 1000 advertisers post-acquisition last year.

For example, only yesterday, he was seen on stage with the chairman of global advertising and partnerships at NBCUniversal. During the interview, he appealed to prospective advertisers stating he was open to hearing their legitimate concerns. However, he refused to make any changes to accommodate their needs if he didn't find their concerts valid.

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