X’s advert enterprise improved underneath departing CEO Linda Yaccarino, but it surely’s nonetheless robust instances forward
Former NBCU advert exec Linda Yaccarino’s tenure at X might have been pretty quick — simply two years from begin to end — however she did handle to make an impression on the social community’s advert enterprise, new information from advert intelligence agency Guideline exhibits. Yaccarino might be leaving X in a greater place with its advertisers than she discovered it, it says.
Within the U.S., advert spending was up 62% year-over-year within the first half of 2025, Guideline notes. As well as, Yaccarino beforehand claimed that 96% of X’s advertisers returned to X as of Could 2025.
Nevertheless, it took time for X’s promoting enterprise to show round, and it stays a turbulent enterprise.
Yaccarino’s departure may have a major impression on X’s profitability, as the corporate is nowhere close to able to rely totally on different income streams. Its X Premium subscriptions, for instance, solely account for a small portion of its enterprise, and it hasn’t but launched its broader ambitions round an X Cash funds service.
Yaccarino first joined X in June 2023 after spending practically 12 years at NBCUniversal, the place she had been chairman of world promoting and partnerships. On the time, X (then known as Twitter) was going through a crucial promoting downturn.
Lots of the preliminary cuts to advert spend had been prompted by Elon Musk’s takeover of the community in October 2022. With cuts to Twitter workers, together with its Belief and Security division, misinformation and hate speech proliferated — which advertisers needed nothing to do with. Reuters famous that 14 of the 30 prime advertisers stopped all their promoting on the platform, and 4 advertisers had diminished their spending from 92% to 98.7% round that point.
Guideline’s information discovered that 89% of Twitter/X’s U.S. advert {dollars} had been eroded within the two years between Q3 2022 and Q3 2024. (These declines had really begun in Q2 2022, after it was revealed that Musk purchased a 9.4% stake within the firm, the agency informed TechCrunch through electronic mail.)
By early 2023, reviews surfaced that greater than 500 of Twitter’s advertisers had left the platform, and fourth-quarter revenues dropped by 35%.
Citing inner paperwork, The New York Occasions reported that the social community’s U.S. advert enterprise was down 59% from a 12 months earlier, from the 5 weeks between April 1 and the primary week of Could 2023, reaching $88 million. Its weekly gross sales projections had been additionally down by as a lot as 30%. X then tried luring advertisers again with advert credit.
There have been hints that Yaccarino was working behind the scenes to restore issues, although.
A 12 months after she joined X, the Occasions reported that 65% of advertisers had returned, citing recordings of inner conferences on the firm. In August 2023, Yaccarino claimed that X’s operational run charge was near “break even.”
However the scenario worsened once more that 12 months with an advertiser boycott.
In November 2023, manufacturers together with Apple, Disney, and IBM paused their advert spending on X within the wake of Musk’s endorsement of an antisemitic submit. The social community was already on monitor for an almost 55% year-over-year decline in worldwide advert spending, in accordance with eMarketer estimates, and this boycott threatened to worsen the scenario additional.
Musk had additionally been a problem for Yaccarino throughout her time with the corporate. The X proprietor and SpaceX exec famously informed X advertisers leaving to “go fuck your self,” calling their departure a type of blackmail. When cursing at them didn’t work, X sued as an alternative, saying theirs was an “unlawful boycott.” (The swimsuit was expanded in early 2025 to incorporate extra advertisers, comparable to LEGO and Shell.)
The specter of litigation labored — corporations together with Verizon and Ralph Lauren resumed promoting on the platform after receiving authorized threats, The Wall Road Journal reported in June 2025. The World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) additionally suspended the operations of its World Alliance for Accountable Media (GARM) nonprofit after the lawsuit was filed towards it.
Guideline’s information additionally signifies that X has seen elevated U.S. advert spend since December 2024 — the primary time since Musk purchased the corporate, it says. From Q3 2024 to This autumn 2024, spending was up 37.7%, influenced by the U.S. presidential elections.
Throughout Yaccarino’s time, X additionally made strikes to make sure extra model security, partnering with adtech corporations DoubleVerify and Integral Advert Science (IAS) to warn them if advertisements had been positioned round inappropriate content material. It additionally supplied manufacturers instruments to regulate the sensitivity of the place their advertisements had been displayed on the app, the place extra “relaxed” advert slots would value much less, and people with larger security considerations would pay extra. Later, X launched methods for advertisers to run their advertisements subsequent to a curated set of content material creators.
None of this has stopped X from being a controversial platform with regard to advert security.
This week, as an illustration, the positioning’s AI bot Grok went off the rails after experiencing antisemitic outbursts requiring X to take it offline. Now, as an alternative of going through one other advert disaster, Yaccarino is leaving — though her choice was reportedly made previous to the Grok incident.