Twitter explainer: What are rate limits and why are they causing advertising headaches
Twitter advertising troubles may have gone from bad to worse after Elon Musk has put his foot in it again – this time by restricting users’ viewing limits over data concerns.
On Saturday, the billionaire ex-CEO of Twitter imposed a temporary ‘rate limit’ on all users, effectively capping the number of Tweets that accounts can view per day, in order to “address extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation”.
Naturally, Twitter users were quick to make memes out of the situation, with some complaining the restrictions were too severe and could kill user engagement.
Some users said they were only able to scroll a handful of times before a ‘rate limit’ message blocked them from viewing anymore posts.
Musk has since revised the cap to 10,000 posts per day for verified accounts, 1,000 for unverified accounts and 500 for newly registered unverified accounts.
As well as joking that he wanted to make more people go outside, Musk’s main concern is about bots visiting Twitter and gathering data from it to train new AI models.
Earlier this year, Twitter accused Microsoft of “illegally” using its data for OpenAI models such as ChatGPT, which it has invested billions of dollars in.
Advertising troubles for Twitter
The rate limit fiasco has sparked concerns about the site’s advertising potential, as Twitter users are now unable to see advertisers’ pages once they max out their daily views.
Jasmine Enberg, principal analyst at Insider Intelligence, said that capping users views could be “catastrophic” for the Twitter’s online advertising business.
“This certainly isn’t going to make it any easier to convince advertisers to return. It’s a hard sell already to bring advertisers back,” she said.
Top advertisers left the social media site in droves last year following Musk’s haywire takeover of the platform late last year.
In November he rushed to reassure advertisers who were alarmed to find that blue ticks – which authenticate high profile accounts – were gone unless users paid for them.
More exited in January, citing Musk’s reinstatement of suspended accounts and radical policy changes, including allowing political advertisers to return to the site, as some of the reasons for pulling their adverts.
“With this level of instability advertisers can’t afford a spray and pray approach,” said Christopher Hogg, chief revenue officer at data management company Lotame. However, speaking to City PM, he suggested that abandoning the platform altogether was a bad idea.
“Brands need to integrate their Twitter spend into a wider advertising strategy that is diversified across multiple channels, spreading risk and maximising reach,” Hogg explained.
“By leveraging insights that span all channels, brands can find where target audiences reside and achieve incremental reach with minimal overlap.”
If advertisers are looking for an opportunity to jump ship, they might not have to search hard as reports emerged last month that Zuckerberg-owned Meta is preparing to launch a new social media platform designed to rival Twitter.
Twitter was contacted for comment.