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More than a quarter of global marketers plan to spend less money taking out ads on Elon Musk’s X next year, as trust in the social media platform continues to crater.
That’s according to marketing insights and analytics company Kantar, which recently released its annual Media Reactions report. In 2022, before Musk acquired the social media platform and rebranded it from Twitter, 15% of marketers had a favorable view of the company. Now, a net 21% of marketers have an unfavorable view of X, which has losing advertisers left-and-right over the past few years.
“X’s decline in the eyes of marketers didn’t start with Musk, but the trajectory hasn’t changed since his takeover,” Kantar’s report states.
Although X has tried to find other ways of making money — like charging for verification badges and access to its artificial intelligence chatbot, Grok — about 90% of its revenue comes from advertisers. According to ad-tracking company MediaRadar, advertisers lowered their spending to just shy of $744 million over the first six months of 2024, a 24% year-over-year decrease.
Soon after his acquisition, Musk 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.
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. Non-member companies and civil rights groups also paused their advertising, leading Musk to threaten to publicly “name and shame” groups that halted their spending, which just 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.
Despite Musk’s later attempts to walk back those comments, and move to get back in-line with GARM’s requirements, advertisers are staying largely clear of X. Just 4% of marketers think the company provides brand safety, while 39% of marketers think Google does.
When Musk tapped into his immense coffers to buy Twitter for $44 billion in 2022, he was helped out by a laundry list of big-name investors — from Sean “Diddy” Combs to Oracle’s Larry Ellison — as well as bank loans that have remained “hung” ever since. The Washington Post reports that Fidelity now values its stake in X by about 72% lower than when Musk bought it.