Twitter Ad Revenue (2020–2025)
Twitter, now known as X since its renaming in 2023, currently stands as one of consumers' favorite social media platforms. However, it is anticipated to witness a global user base decline of 5.1% in 2024, shrinking to 335.7 million.
What implications does this decrease hold for the micro-blogging site's earnings? Let's delve into Twitter's ad revenue over recent years and how expert forecasts have evolved.
Twitter ad revenue 2023
According to news reports at the end of 2023, X’s ad revenues were set to fall to $2.5 billion for the year, missing its original target of $3 billion by $500 million.
Throughout the first three quarters of the year, reports indicated that the company generated just over $600 million in ad revenues per quarter, marking a significant decline from 2022 when it reportedly earned over $1 billion in ad revenue each quarter.
X (Twitter) ad revenue: March 2023 forecast
X, which stopped publishing financial figures following its takeover by Elon Musk in 2022, has seen its ad revenue forecast get slashed by industry analysts over the past few years.
In a March 2023 report estimating X’s ad revenues, the platform was anticipated to generate $2.98 billion in 2023. This would represent a 27.9% tumble from 2022’s figure and the second successive year of decline in X’s (Twitter) advertising revenues.
Meanwhile, other rival social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok were expected to witness an increase in ad revenues in 2023.
X (Twitter) ad revenue: November 2022 forecast
The March 2023 forecast follows an earlier prediction published in November 2022 that forecasted rising annual revenues between 2022 and 2024, with 2024’s ad revenues projected at $4.79 billion.
However, as analysts grasped a better understanding of the network’s advertising business since Musk’s takeover, which revealed substantial harm, they’ve revised their estimations downward.
X (Twitter) ad revenue: falling performance since takeover
Another report indicates that in each of the 10 months following Musk’s takeover in October 2022, X’s (Twitter) ad revenues in the United States plummeted by at least 55% year on year.
In the immediate aftermath of the company’s acquisition, there were mass resignations and layoffs of X’s workforce. Coupled with unaddressed brand safety issues, this slew of problems spelled instability for advertisers, and the falling trust in Twitter led advertisers to quit the network and experts to downgrade Twitter ad revenue estimates. A report shows that nearly half of the top 30 advertisers on Twitter had pulled their ad efforts on the platform within the first three months of the takeover.
Ad revenue isn’t the only aspect to have been plagued by Musk’s acquisition of Twitter. In fact, the decline in the number of Twitter users worldwide in 2023 was the first annual decrease in at least five years. Twitter’s user base in the US, home to the largest number of Twitter users, also fell in 2023 and is expected to continue shrinking this year by 1%, to 56.9 million.