Transcript:
Conway Gittens: I’m Conway Gittens reporting from the New York Stock Exchange. Here’s what we’re watching on TheStreet today.
With signs of an economic slowdown emerging - Wall Street is focused on one thing - how many people are working. There are new clues Thursday from hiring company ADP. Only 99,000 private sector jobs were created in August - the smallest number in more than 3-1/2 years. But in a positive offset, weekly applications for jobless benefits dropped, according to data from the Labor Department, which shows layoffs remain tame. These numbers set the stage for the government’s comprehensive monthly jobs report on Friday.
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In other news…the ad sales desert at X is going to get a lot worse next year. A record number of companies plan to pull back their ad spending on the site in 2025, according to a global survey by market research firm Kantar.
26 percent of ad buyers say they will reduce spending on X in 2025. Only 4 percent believe their ads will be placed away from extreme content on the platform, compared to 39 percent on Google properties like YouTube.
Advertisers have grown tired of the antics of X’s billionaire CEO Elon Musk, who promised to clean up the site, but instead has pushed misinformation and other misdeeds. Musk recently sent out an AI-doctored photo of Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris dressed in an old-school communist uniform. And X was forced to go dark in Brazil because Musk wouldn’t agree to that country’s content moderation rules ahead of an election.
Those things point to a problem that showed up in the survey’s findings. In a statement, Gonca Bubonic, Kantar’s global thought leadership director for media, said “X has changed so much in recent years and can be unpredictable from one day to the next - it’s difficult to feel confident about your brand safety in that environment.
Since Musk took over the company formerly known as Twitter in 2022, the site has lost billions of dollars in revenue.
That’ll do it for your Daily Briefing. From the New York Stock Exchange, I’m Conway Gittens with TheStreet.
