X Ad Sales Projected To Fall More Than 50 Percent – Report

The scale of the advertising revenue decline at Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) has been revealed in a new media report.

Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter, that X is set to miss internal goals for ad revenue, as the personal tweets from Elon Musk and others continue to scare off advertisers.

Indeed, according to the Bloomberg report, X is projected to bring in approximately $2.5 billion in advertising revenue in 2023. This is a significant slump from prior years, according to people familiar with the matter.

Ad revenues

For example, the Bloomberg report noted that X’s revenue from advertising services for the last four quarters as a public company (before the Musk takeover) totalled $4.7 billion, according to LSEG data.

This was for the period covering the second half of 2021 and first half of 2022. Musk completed his Twitter takeover in late October 2022.

Now X is projected to bring in approximately $2.5 billion during 2023, with Twitter reportedly generating a little more than $600 million in advertising revenue in each of the first three quarters of the year.

Bloomberg, citing a person familiar with the numbers, reported that X is anticipating a similar performance in the current period.

That compares to more than $1 billion per quarter in 2022.

Twitter executives had targeted $3 billion in revenue from advertising and subscriptions in 2023, but will fall far short of that number, according to the Bloomberg report.

Twitter denial

However X gave a rare response to the media, when Joe Benarroch, head of business operations at X, told Reuters that the Bloomberg report “presents an incomplete view of our entire business, as the sources Bloomberg relied on for information are not providing accurate and comprehensive details.”

Reuters has previously reported that Twitter’s US ad revenue has declined at least 55 percent year-over-year each month since Musk’s takeover, according to third-party data provided to Reuters in October.

Reuters reported that ad sales make up between 70 and 75 percent of X’s total revenue.

Elon Musk himself has previously admitted a massive decline in advertising on X, and in the summer Musk tweeted that the social media platform has lost about 50 percent of its ad revenues since he took over the company in October 2022.

Advertising exodus

Last month the New York Times reported that X could lose as much as $75 million in ad revenues by the end of the year, due to the latest advertising exodus from the platform.

The New York Times reported that it had viewed internal documents from X, which showed more than 200 ad units of companies from the likes of Airbnb, Amazon, Coca-Cola and Microsoft, have either halted, or are considering pausing their ads on the social network.

The report states that X could lose as much as $75 million in advertising revenue by the end of the year, as advertisers move their ad spend to less risky platforms from the likes of Facebook, TikTok or LinkedIn.

The internal documents citing by the NYT reportedly come from X’s sales team and are meant to track the impact of all the advertising lapses this month. This includes those by companies that have already paused and others that may be at risk of pausing their advertising spend.