A record 26 percent of marketers worldwide are planning to cut their advertising spend on Tesla billionaire Elon Musk’s social media platform X (formerly Twitter) because of what they term as extreme content that could potentially harm their brands, a new report shows.
The Media Reactions 2024 survey by market research firm Kantar found that only four percent of marketers think that X ads provide brand safety, with data showing that the overall trust in X ads has fallen from 22 percent in 2022 to 12 percent this year.
“X’s decline in the eyes of marketers didn’t start with Musk, but the trajectory hasn’t changed since his takeover. 26 percent of marketers globally now plan to decrease their spending in X in 2025,” reads the report.
“Funnily enough, the decreasing marketing spend in X makes consumers happier as the ad load goes down. Consumer ad preference for X has gone up significantly since 2022.”
The expected dip is likely to worsen the platform’s advertising fortunes, which have been on a downward spiral since the Mr Musk took over in October 2022, with the billionaire reporting that the platform had lost at least half of its ad revenue just three months after he assumed ownership.
This was largely as the result of radical, far-reaching disruption brought about by a flurry of changes Mr Musk made as he sought to steer the social media giant into what he called a ‘free speech’ platform.
According to Eugene Tolbert, a Kenyan digital influencer who boasts 33,200 followers on the platform, X’s shaky regulatory framework has failed to inspire advertiser confidence, compared to rival apps such as Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram, which he says have clear rules to ringfence safety.
“When Elon Musk came up with this idea of liberalising X in the name of promoting free speech, he opened up the platform to all manner of content and it’s not a surprise to even see pornographic material pop up on your timeline nowadays,” observes Mr Tolbert.
“X has also introduced a ‘For You’ timeline that largely distorts your content interests and tastes and conveys irrelevant feeds and this raises the fear among advertisers that their sponsored ads could land to the wrong audience,” he adds.
In Kenya, the Musk-led disruptions have seen X’s performance deteriorate after it became the only social media platform whose potential ad reach in the country declined in the full year to December 2023.
The Digital 2024 Report for Kenya, published in May this year by global digital insights platform Datareportal, showed that the potential audience that Kenyan marketers could reach with ads on X had fallen by 26,000, or 1.4 percent.
The worsened performance came during a year in which the ad reach of rival platforms increased significantly, in the case of Facebook by as much as 41.1 per cent year-on-year.
A fortnight ago, X unveiled a new TV application called the X TV app as it seeks to edge Google’s YouTube out of the video ad revenue market.
