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New data suggests Elon Musk has made multiple attempts to convince companies to advertise on his social media site, but has failed.
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Advertisers appear to have spent about $744 million on the former Twitter X in the first half of 2024. That’s about 24% lower than the more than $982 million advertisers poured into the platform in the first half of 2023, according to ad tracking firm MediaRadar.
The data confirms what’s been clear for more than a year: Twitter has a revenue problem. About 90% of the company’s revenue comes from advertising, although X is trying to boost profits by charging for verified badges and access to its artificial intelligence chatbot, Grok, according to The New York Times. In March, Musk said the company was worth $20 billion, less than half of the $44 billion he paid to buy it. To be fair, Twitter rarely reported profits when it was a public company.
X’s advertising business has been in a bind since Musk formally took ownership of the company in October 2022. Shortly after, the billionaire began pressuring advertisers to keep spending with him without making many commitments to curb hate speech and misinformation.
Members of the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), a coalition of global advertisers, were concerned that Musk would do away with established brand safety standards and recommended that members halt advertising spending on the site. The group’s voluntary membership includes several companies, including Dell (DELL), BP (BP), Electronic Arts (EA), IKEA, Microsoft (MSFT) and PepsiCo (PEP).
According to a recent lawsuit filed by X against the alliance, which quickly led to GARM’s closure, at least 18 companies, including CVS Health (CVS) and Unilever (UL), stopped buying ads from it between November and December 2022. X claims that GARM conspired to cause its members to “withhold billions of dollars in advertising revenue.”
Companies that weren’t GARM members also paused their advertising, including United Airlines (UAL), Volkswagen, and civil rights groups like the NAACP. At the time, Musk publicly threatened to “name and shame” groups that suspended spending, helping to alienate hundreds of companies.
Tensions flared again about a year later after reports emerged that ads from companies including Walt Disney Co. and NBCUniversal had appeared next to posts praising Nazis. X later filed a lawsuit against Media Matters, the group that published the report. In response, several companies, including Disney, pulled their ads.
“Don’t run ads,” Musk said at The New York Times’ DealBook Summit in November 2023. “If someone tries to blackmail you with ads? If someone tries to blackmail you with money? Fuck you. Fuck you. Got it?” Musk continued, singling out Disney CEO Bob Iger by name.
In June, with the company’s advertising revenue down 36% year-over-year, Musk tried to walk back those comments, insisting he wasn’t speaking to “advertisers as a whole” but was emphasizing his commitment to free speech. He said that while “advertisers have the right to show their ads next to content they believe aligns with their brand,” it’s “not cool” to demand that “there can’t be content on our platform that we don’t agree with.”
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