X Faces Major Advertising Setback as 26% of Brands Plan to Cut Ad Budgets

According to research performed by data firm Kantar, which was interviews performed with 18,000 customers and 1000 senior marketers worldwide, 26% of marketers want to reduce their advertising expenditure on X in 2025.

More than a quarter of advertisers are planning to cut their spending on Elon Musk’s X due to concerns about the content put on the social media platform and their confidence in the information disseminated, according to recent global research.

Elon Musk bought Twitter, now called X, for $44 billion (£38 billion) in October 2022. Since then, the revenue coming from advertisements has dropped precipitously. He claimed that the site had not lived up to its potential as a social media platform for free speech.

Due to Musk’s unpredictable and controversial behaviour, when he had almost 200 million followers, he sparked a backlash from advertisers who have reduced or stopped running their promotions on the platform.

According to research performed by data firm Kantar, which was interviews performed with 18,000 customers and 1000 senior marketers worldwide, 26% of marketers want to reduce their advertising expenditure on X in 2025.

A director at Kantar, Gonca Bubani, stated that marketers need to trust the platforms they use since they are brand custodians. X has undergone significant changes in recent years, and it can be unpredictable from day to day. It is difficult to feel certain about the brand’s safety in such an environment.

For several years, Kantar has conducted the survey annually. According to the data from 2024, the decline was accelerating, with 14% of marketers stating that they want to reduce budgets this year.

Figures from eMarketer demonstrate that there has been a rapid commercial fall in the platform in recent years. The company’s global revenues peaked in 2021 at $4.46 billion, of which the UK accounted for $366 million, roughly 8% of the total.

In 2022, global revenues fell to $4.14 billion. They have more than halved since the richest man in the world took over the site at the end of that year. By the end of this year, annual revenue is expected to drop to $1.9 billion, with UK revenues predicted to be barely $160 million.

Advertisers have been shifting their marketing budget away from X for several years. It appears doubtful that this trend will reverse, given how dramatically it has accelerated over the past 12 months.

This departure of advertisers is just one of many business setbacks for Musk. He has faced criticism over posts related to topics like antisemitism, the recent riots in the UK, and US politics. The most recent post was a ban on Brazil‘s X.

Brazil is one of its largest international marketplaces, with more than 20 million users. But the Brazilian Supreme Court decided unanimously to uphold a ban on X after the company refused to obey court orders demanding the removal of accounts suspected of spreading disinformation and the designation of a local legal representative by the social network.

Kantar research demonstrates that marketers’ confidence in ads continues to decline, with a drop from 22% in 2022 to 12% in 2024. Just 4% of marketers believe that brand protection is provided by adverts on X.

Last month, X sued a lawsuit against the global advertising alliance and several significant businesses, including Unilever, Mars, and CVS Health, claiming that they had illegally planned to avoid the social network and purposely caused it to lose revenue.

Musk tweeted at the time that he was willing to maintain peace for two years, but not anymore.

Last year, during an on-stage interview at an event in New York, Musk delivered a profanity-filled warning message to advertisers pulling money from X.

Advertisers are fully aware that X now offers stronger brand safety, performance, and analytics capabilities than before while seeing an all-time high in usage.

According to Double Verify and Integral Ad Science, the brand safety rate is 99% on average. It is also supported by Kantar statistics which show the majority of advertisers are increasing their investment in X.