Report: Twitter is not antagonizing Google, a large advertiser and Cloud provider

Abner Li | Mar 4 2023 - 1:16 pm PT

From layoffs to not paying bills, Twitter has been on a cost-cutting drive since the Elon Musk acquisition. The latter has resulted in lawsuits from landlords and vendors, though one partner Twitter is not antagonizing is Google.

The Information reported on 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, though it tried to renegotiate a contract that stipulates $1 billion in Google Cloud spending over a five-year period. Google is said to have refused. (For 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 on:

Yesterday’s report reveals that “Google is an even bigger advertiser on Twitter than Amazon.” Anecdotally, Android ads about Google Messages are fairly common. Google’s various social accounts remain active on the platform, though Search Liaison did create a Mastodon account pretty early on. No major brand accounts have followed.

During the Apple-Twitter drama of late November/early December, reporting emerged that Apple was Twitter’s biggest ad buyer during Q1 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 struck a licensing deal to have Twitter posts instantly show up in Google Search results. This is very useful for live events, like sports, and presumably a continuing revenue source for Twitter.