Advertisers have been fleeing Twitter in droves as the chaos of Elon Musk’s leadership unfolds. Half the platform's top 100 advertisers have now departed, according to Media Matters. Meanwhile, the up-and-coming Twitter rival Mastodon has seen its number of active users swell from 300,000 to 2.6 million in the month since Musk's takeover. But advertisers who want to follow migrating users and their dollars will find a tiny snag in their plans: Mastodon doesn't support advertising. At all. The service promotes itself as "social networking that's not for sale."
Unlike on Twitter or Facebook, no one can pay to boost their Mastodon posts, and there is no algorithmic analysis of users’ interests that can assist brands with ad targeting. A company can set up a profile there, but its posts won’t hit the eyeballs of anyone who isn’t actively following its account.
“They’re just not going to get seen in a non-organic way,” said Eugen Rochko, Mastodon’s founder and CEO of the eponymous non-profit that runs the network.
That doesn’t mean all is lost for businesses on Mastodon, though—they just need to use it in ways that might genuinely appeal to users.
While Twitter and Facebook are centralized social networks, Mastodon is a federation of individual social networks—“instances” of Mastodon—that run the same software and allow people to follow others across the federation. Different instances have different rules, and Rochko permits brand accounts on the Mastodon.social instance that he runs if their posts are clearly distinguishable from spam.
“As long as it’s an actual company that is well-known, that’s just posting about their products now and again, like a normal account, then it’s fine,” he said.
Very few Mastodon users will choose to follow advertisers, and those users who share their messages might incur the wrath of instance operators who don’t approve of advertising, said Jeff Jarvis, a prominent media pundit and journalism professor at the City University of New York.
“Marketing per se probably won’t fit into Mastodon,” said Jarvis. “However, I do see an opening for customer service. If I were United Airlines, I’d start an account on Mastodon and, if people have problems, they can reach out as they can do on Twitter.” (United Airlines is one of the advertisers that fled Twitter, though—like every other major brand—it has not yet announced a Mastodon account.)
“I think it’s possible [that] a brand can build relationships of trust and value on Mastodon," Jarvis says. "The old model of purely attention-based advertising ain’t going to work here, but relationship-based marketing could work if it’s done very carefully."
Jarvis's view chimes with that of PR guru Richard Edelman, who published a blog post a couple weeks ago saying companies could use Mastodon to build communities. “A large retailer could use the platform to convene or join a conversation across business, academia and NGOs around sustainability,” Edelman wrote. “A video gaming brand could create a server to speak directly to gamers.”
That idea of companies setting up their own Mastodon instances could prove key. According to Rochko, many people on Mastodon don’t like the idea of brands setting up accounts on community-run instances, because the people running those instances are "providing a free service and brands would use that free service for commercial purposes.”
And since Mastodon account names also include the name of the instance—this author's is @superglaze@mastodon.social—brands might prefer to set up instances using the familiar web addresses that they've been promoting for years.
“A lot of people would be more okay if brands would spin up their own Mastodon servers for a couple reasons,” Rochko said. “One is authentication—if your account is on a domain that belongs to your brand then people know it’s the real deal. The best kind of verified mark that you can have is having your own [web] domain name...Two, they’re not using anybody else’s resources but their own.”
Mastodon has been around for six years, but it's still early in its new phase as a potentially mainstream replacement for Twitter. As Edelman wrote earlier this month, “smart companies will observe for a month or more before participating…It’s vital to watch and learn the mores of the community.”
