Picture: KACPER PEMPEL/REUTERSEven as China bars 1.4-billion citizens from Twitter, its local authorities are splurging on global advertising on the site, helping make the country the platform’s fastest-growing overseas ad market and one of its largest non-US revenue sources.
The review shows for the first time just how important China has become for Twitter, under pressure from investors to meet growth targets as its US business stalls. It comes with the company embroiled in a legal battle with Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who is attempting to back out of his unsolicited $44bn offer to buy Twitter.
Gaming, e-commerce, and tech firms in China are also Twitter customers, according to two sources. Twitter’s sales of overseas ads to Chinese clients are estimated to be in the “hundreds of millions of dollars a year”, the people said, the majority coming from these companies.Twitter declined to comment on internal discussions and its sales performance in China. A spokesperson said the company has never hidden that it does business with Chinese commercial entities.
Twitter said it is improving auto-detection technology aimed at activities that violate the platform’s policies. “This work is challenging and we know we have more to do,” the company said in a statement. Chinese local authorities continued buying foreign social media ads and content even after the Covid-19 pandemic triggered the closure of the country’s borders, according to a review of 36 publicly available local government tenders, budget documents from 2020-2022, and social media accounts. It was not immediately clear why such ads were placed with China effectively closed.
Those included the verified accounts @PDChinaLife and @PDChinaSports, run by the Communist Party’s official People’s Daily, and which continued to advertise on Twitter until as recently as last month, as well as @iChongqing, a state-run operation paid by the southwestern metropolis of Chongqing.