Whether Twitter owner Elon Musk is a financial wizard (having built an $8.2 billion Tesla) or someone who has not properly invested his family wealth is still a hotly debated topic, especially considering the fact that ever since his acquisition of Twitter for $44 billion, the company’s value — under his management — has been reduced to $15 billion according to one of its investors (Fidelity Blue Chip Growth Fund). Twitter has also lost advertising support, which could be attributed to Musk’s own aversion to the concept of advertising for his Tesla EVs.
Recently, Musk — who most observers agree has a reputation for being unpredictable and volatile, but also someone who thinks outside the box — hired former NBCUni ad boss Linda Yaccarino to replace him as CEO. By teaming with the more structured Yaccarino, Musk hopes to make Twitter become profitable while still putting his own imprint on the social media platform.
Take his latest approach to Twitter’s metric for advertisers’ acceptance, for example: “Unregretted” user minutes. The word “unregretted” has been in the dictionary for many years (after first being used in 1668) and is all over search engine result pages. What “unregretted” is was explained by Musk in December. When people say, “I spent two hours on TikTok, but I regret those two hours.” What Musk wants is to make sure people don’t regret their time spent on Twitter.
Now, if the concept is brilliant, the execution is cloudy. Indeed, how to measure something that means different things to different people remains a formula that has yet to be discovered. What is known is that Twitter has 450 million users (211 million active users) and attracts 130 million hours of people’s time each day. We also know that people engage on the average for just over three minutes at a time.
Now the trick is to figure out how to find out how many, out of these three minutes, are “regretted,” and how to make more minutes “unregretted.”
The answer to the “unregretted” question could ultimately also be the solution to the streaming platform’s “search fatigue” problem.
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