Elon Musk Officially Appoints Former NBCUniversal Executive Linda Yaccarino As CEO Of Twitter

Elon Musk has appointed former NBCUniversal ad chief Linda Yaccarino, as Twitter's new CEO. (photo: twitter @lindayacc)

JAKARTA - Elon Musk has appointed former NBCUniversal ad chief Linda Yaccarino, as Twitter's new CEO. This appointment was made because the company tried to reverse the decline in advertising revenue.

Yacarino will take over a social media platform facing many challenges and heavy debt burdens, after he spent several years modernizing the advertising business at NBCUniversal, owned by Comcast Corp.

Since Musk bought Twitter in October, advertisers have fled the social media platform, fearing their ads could appear alongside inappropriate content after the company lost nearly 80% of staff. Musk earlier this year admitted that Twitter experienced a huge decline in advertising revenue.

"The Twitter paper will soon turn 180 degrees" under Yaccarino's leadership, said Lou Paskalis, an ad industry executive who has been in the field for a long time and CEO of AJL Advisory, a marketing consultant.

Musk said Yaccarino would help build "aplications of everything," which he had previously mentioned, could offer a variety of services such as inter-friend payments. The selection of ad veterans shows that digital advertising will remain the main focus of Twitter's business.

Musk has fired thousands of Twitter employees, releasing subscription products in a hurry that allows fraudsters to emulate big brands, and suspend users with whom he disagrees, all of which has frightened major brands to spend money on the platform.

To diversify from advertising, the billionaire has focused on Twitter Blue, a subscription feature that costs $8 per month to verify their account, but the product has limited success.

Independent researcher Travis Brown, who has been tracking Twitter Blue subscribers from time to time, estimates there will be 619,858 subscribers on April 30.