Report Claims Advertisers Will Flee Elon’s IX Next Year, Revenue in Tank and More

Disrupted social media platform X is expected to lose more advertising revenue next year. It makes you wonder how many more brands can escape the site before we fall into a pile of debt and racist memes.

On Thursday, marketing research firm Kantar published a report that examined the advertising outlook for several major web platforms. While many big-name sites, such as TikTok and Netflix, are widely trusted by advertisers, the website formerly known as Twitter is increasingly viewed as distrustful. Because of this, X is expected to see another exodus of advertisers next year.

“Another brand is not well received by advertisers: X. Only 4 percent of marketers think X ads provide product safety, compared to 39 percent of Google that boast about it,” the report notes. “Marketers’ overall trust in X ads has dropped from 22% to 12% as of 2022. While a total of 15% of marketers were in favor of X ads in 2022, now a total of 21% of marketers are against it. X’s decline in the eyes of marketers didn’t start with Musk, but the trajectory hasn’t changed since he took over.”

It continues: “26% of marketers worldwide now plan to reduce their spending on X by 2025.” Ironically, the lack of ads on X seems to have made users like it more. “The drop in marketing costs on X makes consumers happy as the number of ads goes down. Consumers’ choice of ads for X has increased significantly since 2022.”

It should be noted that Musk’s site has lost a significant amount of revenue, probably due to its strange policies and the increasingly aggressive behavior of its founder. “Advertisers have been moving their ad spend away from X for several years,” Gonca Bubani, Kantar’s director of thought leadership in media, told CNN. Bubani also said “revolution [of advertising money] at the moment it seems unlikely.”

Gizmodo has reached out to X for comment.

The results of the report are not particularly surprising, because Musk has all but made his site a child of what can be called “product risk.” He did so by allowing massive pro-Nazi slurs and 4chan-adjacent swill to explode all over users’ feeds, while basically declaring war on the advertising industry itself. Last month, X sued the global advertising organization known as GARM, or the Global Alliance for Responsible Media. GARM is essentially a brand safety organization that prohibits companies from advertising on platforms that host content that could turn off consumers. GARM previously warned advertisers that X was too toxic to be trusted, and encouraged companies not to advertise on its platform. UX and Musk turned the boycott into a “freedom of speech” issue, saying it was a strange corporate conspiracy to block the “marketplace of ideas,” as CEO Linda Yaccarino put it. GARM was eventually forced to close due to the lawsuit.

Long story short: suing a product safety organization is probably not the best way to show advertisers that you care about them. With so much dishonesty evident in their industry, it’s not really surprising that the sentiment from marketers would seem to be the same.