Chapter X announced the return of advertisers to the social network, but third-party statistics do not agree

Speaking at CES 2025 in Las Vegas, X CEO Linda Yaccarino said that 90% of advertisers who left after Elon Musk bought Twitter in October 2022 are now back. Third-party statistics say that X has had fewer and fewer advertisers over the past couple of years.

Image source: YouTube, X

Before the presidential election last November, Sensor Tower 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 display their ads on the platform. In October 2023, a year after Musk purchased the social network Twitter, only 50 out of 100 advertisers refused the platform’s advertising services. 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 on Platform X 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 abandoned X’s advertising services. If we consider that in September there were three more companies, we can talk about a reversal of the negative trend. As of December last year, among the 100 largest advertisers in the United States, 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 large client of the platform at that time, but in 2024 it became the largest advertiser of X, providing the social network with 3% of all advertising revenues during the period .

According to Chapter 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’s pages and place ads on them based on what customers want. There will also be more control over the placement of advertisements in unwanted discussion threads, all of which should help X attract more advertisers this year than in the past.

According to Sense Tower, the average number of active users X fell 13% year-on-year in the last quarter. Since the US presidential election, it has declined by 6% on a sequential basis. It’s possible that TikTok’s US ban will cause some user traffic to X Pages, but that can’t be guaranteed. This year, X is going to launch a branded payment tool called X Money, although it originally planned to do so in the past.