Speaking at CES 2025 in Las Vegas, X CEO Linda Yaccarino said that 90% of the advertisers who left Twitter after Elon Musk bought it in October 2022 have now returned. Third-party statistics show that X has been losing advertisers for the past couple of years. Even before the presidential election last November, Sensor Tower representatives told Ars Technica that by September 2024, 72 of the top 100 advertisers who were X (Twitter) clients as of October 2022 had stopped paying to show their ads on the platform. In October 2023, a year after Musk bought Twitter, only 50 of the 100 advertisers had canceled their advertising services on the platform. It turns out that in 2024, advertisers continued to refuse X services.
However, these statistics do not take into account the influx of new advertisers to the X platform and the return of old ones. According to the same Sensor Tower data, by December last year, only 69 of the 100 largest US advertisers had refused X’s advertising services. Considering that in September there were three more companies that had canceled, we can talk about a reversal of the negative trend. As of December last year, among the 100 largest US advertisers, there were 52 companies that did not use the platform’s services until September 2022. For example, Temu was founded shortly before Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022, and therefore technically could not have been a major client of the platform at that time. Still, in 2024 it became X’s largest advertiser, providing the social network with 3% of all advertising revenue for the period.
Innovative Solutions and Future Outlook
According to the head of X, the social network’s innovative solutions help attract advertisers. In about five months, X wants to offer customers a tool called TrendGenius, which will track the most popular topics on X pages and place ads on them according to customer preferences. More control over the placement of ads in unwanted discussion threads will also be introduced, which should help X attract more advertisers this year than last. According to Sensor Tower, last quarter, the average number of active users of X decreased by 13% year-on-year. After the US presidential election, it decreased by 6% sequentially.
It is possible that the ban on TikTok in the US will cause some migration of users to X pages, but this cannot be guaranteed, notes NIXSOLUTIONS. This year, X is going to launch a proprietary payment method called X Money, although it initially planned to do so last year. We’ll keep you updated as these plans move forward and as advertisers continue to evaluate the platform’s evolving features.
Overall, there do not appear to be major factual errors in the data presented. One minor correction involves ensuring references to Sensor Tower remain consistent throughout the text, which has now been addressed. Otherwise, the information aligns with the original statements about advertiser returns, user activity, and upcoming developments at X.