Elon’s Musk acquisition of X, formerly known as Twitter, hasn’t been great for its bottom line.
X’s monthly revenue has tanked an average of 55% year over year in each of the past 12 months, according to data firm Guideline. Revenue has fallen every month in that period, per Guideline’s research. Musk took over the company at the end of October last year.
The platform’s revenue fell an average of 61% between May and August this year compared to the same time period in 2022. It fell 78% year over year in December, the sharpest drop over the last 12 months. The last time the company reported earnings, in June of last year, it said it had made $1.2 billion in revenue during Q2.
X did not respond to a request for comment. Guideline’s figures are in line with stats Musk shared recently. Last month, he tweeted that “US advertising revenue is still down 60%,” though he didn’t provide a timeframe and claimed without evidence that it was “primarily due to pressure on advertisers by [the Anti-Defamation League] (that’s what advertisers tell us).”
Guideline’s research stands in contrast with the rosy outlook X CEO Linda Yaccarino tried to present at Vox Media’s Code Conference last week. During an onstage interview, she said that 90% of its top 100 advertisers have come back to the platform recently, and that X has 540 million monthly active users.
During and after the conversation, observers noted that Yaccarino seemed unprepared for or unwilling to answer questions from the interviewer, CNBC’s Julia Boorstin, including one about Musk’s proposed plan to charge users a monthly fee. Yaccarino held her phone up during one point of the interview, inadvertently revealing that she did not have the X app on her home screen.
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“Who wouldn’t want Elon Musk sitting by their side running product?” Yaccarino said at one point, prompting laughter and some in the audience to raise their hands.
Meanwhile, changes at X continue: This week, X removed headlines and text descriptions from links shared in posts. Musk previously tweeted that the change was designed to “greatly improve the esthetics [sic]” of the platform.
The company has taken part in a number of new initiatives as of late in what seems to be a move to address the loss of ad revenue. Last month, it started selling programmatic ads via Google. More recently, it inked a deal with Paris Hilton in a deal that will involve her producing exclusive content for the platform through her marketing agency, 11:11 Media.
This week, the Anti-Defamation League said it would start to advertise on X again in an effort to “to bring our important message on fighting hate to X and its users.” Last month, after Musk suggested that the nonprofit was behind a scare campaign to drive advertisers away, the ADL received a surge in threats, its CEO told CNN.
“To be clear, any allegation that ADL has somehow orchestrated a boycott of X or caused billions of dollars of losses to the company or is ‘pulling the strings’ for other advertisers is false,” the ADL wrote in a statement this week. “Indeed, we ourselves were advertising on the platform until the anti-ADL attacks began a few weeks ago. We now are preparing to do so again to bring our important message on fighting hate to X and its users.”
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