The Information reported Friday how “Amazon had threatened to withhold payment for advertising it runs on Twitter because the social network for months refused to pay its Amazon Web Services bills for cloud computing services.”
In contrast, Twitter continues to pay its Google Cloud bill, even as it tried to renegotiate a contract that stipulates $1 billion in Google Cloud spending over a five-year period. Google is said to have declined. (By comparison, the Amazon deal is $510 million over 5.5 years. Twitter originally planned to run the Timeline component on Amazon’s cloud, but has yet to do so, with AWS currently used for Twitter Spaces.)
The two companies have worked with:
Yesterday’s report reveals that “Google is an even bigger advertiser on Twitter than Amazon.” Anecdotally, Android ads about Google Messages are quite common. Google’s various social accounts remain active on the platform, although Search Liaison created a Mastodon account fairly early on. No major brand accounts have followed suit.
During the Apple-Twitter drama in late November/early December, reports emerged that Apple was Twitter’s largest ad buyer during Q1 2022, spending $48 million, 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 make Twitter posts instantly appear in Google search results. This is very useful for live events, like sports, and probably a continued source of revenue for Twitter.
The close relationship helped convince Musk and Davis that antagonizing Google by not footing the cloud bill wasn’t worth the risk, the person said.
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