Musk's Twitter rate limits could undermine new CEO, ad experts say
By Jody Godoy
(Reuters) -Elon Musk's move to temporarily cap how many posts Twitter users can read on the social media site could undermine efforts by new CEO Linda Yaccarino to attract advertisers, marketing industry professionals said.
Musk announced Saturday that Twitter would limit how many tweets per day various accounts can read, to discourage «extreme levels» of data scraping and system manipulation.
Users posted screenshots in reply, showing they were unable to see any tweets, including tweets on the pages of corporate advertisers, after hitting the limit.
Ad industry veterans said the move creates an obstacle for Yaccarino, the former NBCUniversal advertising chief who started last month as Twitter's CEO.
Yaccarino has sought to repair relationships with advertisers who pulled away from the site after Musk bought it last year, the Financial Times reported last week.
The limits are «remarkably bad» for users and advertisers already shaken by the «chaos» Musk has brought to the platform, Mike Proulx, research director at Forrester, said on Sunday.
«The advertiser trust deficit that Linda Yaccarino needs to reverse just got even bigger. And it cannot be reversed based on her industry credibility alone,» he said.
Lou Paskalis, the founder of advertising consultancy AJL Advisory and former marketing boss at Bank of America (NYSE:BAC), said Yaccarino is Musk's «last best hope» to salvage ad revenue and the company's value.
«This move signals to the marketplace that he's not capable of empowering her to save him from himself,» he said.
Under the new cap, unverified accounts were initially limited to 600 posts a day with new unverified accounts limited to 300. Verified accounts could read 6,000 posts a day, Musk said in
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