“I’m thrilled to welcome Linda Yaccarino as the new CEO of Twitter!” Musk said in a tweet on Friday. “@LindaYacc will be primarily focused on business operations, while I focus on product design & new technology.”
Linda Yaccarino will become the new CEO of Twitter. Photo: GI
Linda Yaccarino, 60, is expected to face many challenges after taking over a debt-laden Twitter. However, she is also expected to be able to complete her tasks after a successful three-year stint in the advertising business at NBCUniversal, owned by media conglomerate Comcast Corp.
Since Musk bought Twitter in October, advertisers have been leaving the social media platform, worried that their ads could appear next to inappropriate content after the company lost nearly 80% of its staff. Earlier this year, Musk acknowledged that Twitter had suffered a dramatic decline in advertising revenue.
“Twitter’s trajectory would immediately change 180 degrees” under her leadership, said Lou Paskalis, a longtime advertising industry executive and CEO of AJL Advisory, a marketing consulting firm.
While Musk said Yaccarino will help build an “everything app” that he has previously said could offer a variety of services like peer-to-peer payments, his choice of an advertising veteran signals that digital advertising will continue to be Twitter’s core focus.
Previously, to reduce his dependence on advertising revenue, the billionaire focused on Twitter Blue, a subscription feature that required users to pay $8 per month to verify their accounts, also known as blue ticks, but the product had only limited success.
Independent researcher Travis Brown, who has been tracking Twitter Blue's subscriber numbers over time, estimates there were 619,858 customers using the service as of April 30.
Meanwhile, Yaccarino's departure comes at a difficult time for NBCUniversal. Yaccarino joined NBCU in 2011 after 15 years at Turner Entertainment and is credited with bringing the network's ad sales into the digital age.
Billionaire Musk, CEO of electric carmaker Tesla, completed his $44 billion purchase of Twitter in October 2022. He said on Friday that hiring Yaccarino would allow him to spend more time running Tesla.
Huy Hoang (according to Twitter, Reuters)
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