Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) is anticipated to experience a significant downturn in advertising sales for 2023, plummeting to approximately £2.5bn, Bloomberg News reported on Tuesday (13 Dec).
The decline follows a series of controversies, notably Musk’s endorsement last month of a post on X asserting that Jewish individuals were fostering animosity towards white people.
Media watchdog Media Matters found that ads from Apple were shown alongside anti-Semitic material on X. In a reported published on Friday (8 December), the group alleged X also displayed ads from Amazon and NBC Universal next to white nationalist hashtags.
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The social media platform claims the report was made “with the intention of harming X and its business”.
Subsequently, major corporations such as Comcast, Walt Disney and IBM temporarily suspended their advertisements on the platform.
According to data from the London Stock Exchange Group, X’s advertising revenue for the last four quarters, covering the second half of 2021 and the first half of 2022, amounted to £4.7bn.
For the first three quarters of 2023, X reportedly generated just over £600m in advertising revenue each quarter.
Since Elon Musk’s takeover in October 2022, monthly US advertising revenue has consistently dropped by at least 55% year-over-year, as reported by third-party data provided to Reuters in October.
Advertising sales constitute between 70% and 75% of X’s total revenue. Despite executives initially targeting £3bn in revenue from advertising and subscriptions in 2023, the platform is projected to fall significantly short of that goal, according to Bloomberg’s findings.
In July, Musk attributed Twitter’s negative cash flow to a nearly 50% decline in advertising revenue and a substantial debt burden.
