Elon Musk has named former NBCUniversal advertising chief Linda Yaccarino as Twitter’s new CEO, as the company tries to reverse a plunge in ad revenue.
Yaccarino will take over a social media platform beset with challenges and a heavy debt load, after she spent several years modernising the advertising business at NBCUniversal, which is owned by Comcast.
“I am excited to welcome Linda Yaccarino as the new CEO of Twitter!” Musk said in a tweet on Friday. “@LindaYacc will focus primarily on business operations, while I focus on product design & new technology.”
Since Musk acquired Twitter in October, advertisers have fled the social media platform, worried that their ads could appear next to inappropriate content after the company lost nearly 80% of staff. Musk earlier this year acknowledged that Twitter suffered a massive decline in ad revenue.
Twitter’s “trajectory will immediately take a 180-degree turn” under her leadership, said Lou Paskalis, a longtime ad industry executive and CEO of AJL Advisory, a marketing consultancy.
“I think she has climbed every mountain she could at NBCU and did it impeccably well. And there’s no greater challenge than restoring order at Twitter,” he said.
While Musk said Yaccarino would help build an “everything app”, which he has previously said could offer a variety of services such as peer-to-peer payments, his selection of an advertising veteran signalled that digital ads would continue to be a core focus of the business.
Spooked
Musk has axed thousands of Twitter employees, rushed the launch of a subscription product that allowed scammers to impersonate major brands and suspended users with whom he disagreed, all of which have spooked brands from spending on the platform.
In order to diversify away from ads, the billionaire has focused on Twitter Blue, a subscription feature that costs users US$8/month to verify their accounts, but the product has had limited success.
Independent researcher Travis Brown, who has been tracking the number of Twitter Blue subscribers over time, estimated there were 619 858 customers as of 30 April.
Yaccarino could not be reached for comment.
Musk, the CEO of electric-vehicle maker Tesla Inc, completed his purchase of Twitter in October for $44-billion. He said on Friday that hiring Yaccarino would allow him to spend more time running Tesla. Shares of Tesla ended down 2.4% at $167.98 on Friday. — Dawn Chmielewski and Sheila Dang, with Tiyashi Dattam, (c) 2023 Reuters