From layoffs to not paying bills, Twitter has been cutting costs since acquiring Elon Musk. The latter has resulted in lawsuits from landlords and sellers, though one partner Twitter doesn’t oppose is Google.
The information reported on Friday how “Amazon had threatened to withhold payment for ads it runs on Twitter because the social network refused to pay its Amazon Web Services bills for cloud computing services for months.”
Twitter, on the other hand, continues to pay its Google Cloud bill, even though it tried to renegotiate a contract that commits $1 billion in Google Cloud spending over five years. Google would have refused. (For comparison, the Amazon deal is $510 million over 5.5 years. Twitter originally planned to run Amazon’s timeline component in Amazon’s cloud, but has yet to do so, as AWS is currently used for Twitter Spaces. )
The two companies have worked on:
Yesterday’s report shows that “Google is an even bigger advertiser on Twitter than Amazon.” Anecdotally, Android ads over Google Messages are pretty common. Google’s various social accounts remain active on the platform, although Search Liaison created a Mastodon account quite early on. No major brand accounts followed.
During the late November/early December Apple-Twitter drama, it emerged that Apple was Twitter’s largest ad buyer in the first quarter of 2022 with $48 million spent, or 4% of Twitter’s total revenue for that quarter.
Another aspect of the Google-Twitter relationship is the Tweets that appear in Search. In 2015, the two companies entered into a licensing agreement to allow Twitter posts to appear immediately in Google search results. This is very useful for live events, such as sports, and presumably a continuing source of income for Twitter.
That close bond helped convince Musk and Davis that antagonizing Google by not paying the cloud bill wasn’t worth the risk, the person said.
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