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Elon Musk’s repeated attempts to convince companies to take out advertisements on his social media site appear to have fallen flat, according to new data.
Advertisers apparently spent almost $744 million on X, formerly known as Twitter, during the first six months of 2024. That’s about 24% lower than the more than $982 million advertisers dropped on the platform in the first half of 2023, according to ad-tracking company MediaRadar.
That data backs up what has already been clear for more than a year — X has a revenue problem. Ads make up about 90% of the company’s income, according to The New York Times, although X has tried boosting its bottom line by charging for verification badges and access to its artificial intelligence chatbot, Grok. In March, Musk said his company was worth $20 billion, less than half the $44 billion he paid for it. To be fair, Twitter rarely reported profits when it was a publicly traded company.
X’s ad business has been in trouble practically since Musk officially took ownership of the company in October 2022. Soon after, the billionaire began pressuring advertisers to keep spending their money while offering few assurances that the company would curtail hate speech and misinformation.
Members of the World Federation of Advertisers’s Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), concerned that Musk would do away with its established brand-safety standards, recommended members halt their ad spending on the site. The group’s voluntary membership included several firms, such as Dell (DELL), BP (BP), Electronic Arts (EA), IKEA, Microsoft (MSFT), and Pepsico (PEP), among others.
According to a recent lawsuit filed by X against the federation, which quickly resulted in GARM shutting down, at least 18 companies stopped purchasing advertising between November and December 2022, such as CVS Health (CVS) and Unilever (UL). X alleged that GARM created a conspiracy that saw its members “withhold billions of dollars in advertising revenue.”
Companies that were not GARM members also paused their advertising, including United Airlines (UAL) and Volkswagen, as well as civil rights groups like the NAACP. At the time, Musk threatened to publicly “name and shame” groups that halted their spending, which helped push hundreds of companies away.
Tensions would flare again about a year later, after a report that ads from companies like the Walt Disney Co. and NBCUniversal were showing up near posts praising Nazis. X would later file a lawsuit against the group that published the report, Media Matters. In response, several companies halted their advertising, including Disney.
“Don’t advertise,” Musk said in November 2023 at the Times’ Dealbook Summit. “If someone is going to try and blackmail me with advertising? Blackmail me with money? Go f**k yourself. Go f**k yourself. Is that clear?” he continued, before calling out Disney CEO Bob Iger by name.
In June, as his company’s ad revenue tumbled 36% year-over-year, Musk attempted to walk back those comments, insisting that he wasn’t speaking to “advertisers as a whole” but emphasizing his commitment to free speech. He also said that “advertisers have a right to appear next to content they find compatible with their brands,” but that it is “not cool” when they demand “that there can be no content that they disagree with on the platforms.”
