Adam Bain, the individual who has overseen the growth and recent delceration of Twitter’s advertising business for the last six years has decided to leave the company. This news was confirmed by a Twitter spokesperson on Wednesday after The New York Times reporter Mike Isaac and Recode reported the news.
After 6 years and a once-in-a-lifetime run, I let Jack know that I am ready to change gears and do something new outside the company.
— adam bain (@adambain) November 9, 2016
Twitter said that Bain tendered his resignation on Monday. Right now, it’s unclear at this point, where he’ll land, but he’s said to have told Twitter execs that he won’t be joining a competitor, such as Snapchat. Bain is expected to remain with Twitter through the end of this month.
As of Noember 9th, Twitter’s CO, Anthony Noto, will be taking up Bain’s position as COO permanently and temporarily continue to serve as CFO until the company appoints a replacement.
It is a bit odd to have a CFO with a background in banking taking charge of a media company’s advertising business. But realistically, for Noto, it’s not too strange, as the former CFO of the NFL, he was involved in Twitter’s live-streaming deals with companies like the NFL. Noto had managed the company’s marketing efforts. Noto field a number of questions related to Twitter’s ad business during Twitter’s earnings call with analysts.
Although Bain’s departure from the company looks bad in a bad situation for Twitter, but things might be looking up, or at least, less down, for Twitter.
During the same point in time that Facebook is freaking out investors with the inability to increase ad load nymore, Twitter hit a point where it doesn’t have to, where they have been able to actually been able to decrease ad load.. In Q3 2016 Twitter’s ad load was lower than it had been in Q2 2016, but it was able to make more money from ads in Q3 than Q2.
The two main reasons cited for the ad load decrease/ad revenue increase:
- Twitter has improved its product to the point that it’s getting more people to use Twitter on a daily basis, organically increasing the number of ads Twitter can serve.
- Those people are interacting with its ads more often, indicating that Twitter’s doing a better job picking out which ads to show.
If Twitter is able to keep this trend up, there’s a chance that they could dissuade advertisers from continuing to devalue its ads because it will have been able to show their ability to increse the value of those ads. This will be all up to Noto now.