X CEO indicates ad boycott is now over.

Speaking at CES 2025 as a keynote speaker, X CEO Linda Yaccarino announced that “90 percent of the advertisers” who boycotted X over brand safety concerns following Elon Musk’s Twitter acquisition in 2022, are returning to X. Yaccarino did not elaborate on the shown data to justify the data point; as for X, he did not reply to Ars’ request to comment yet. But Yaccarino’s statistic appeared to support allegations that X made since Donald Trump’s re-election about brands returning to the platform, with some reporting that companies were looking to woo Musk, believed to have leverage over Trump, by boosting X ad spend. That being said, it still remains tough to determine just how much more effective this seemingly large amount of advertisers that are returning will be in the context of once again boosting the value of X, which dropped by as much as 72 percent after Musk’s buyout of Twitter.

But X internal numbers do not fully map to Sensor Tower’s marketing intelligence numbers and it might require more understanding if X’s financial struggle might actually be potentially improving slightly in 2025. Prior to the US presidential election, Sensor Tower had agreed with Ars that seventy-two out of one hundred top spending US advertisers on Twitter/X “have stopped spending on the service as of September 2024.” This was a rise from 50 advertisers who had ceased their advertisement expenditures on Twitter/X in October 2023, which was approximately one year after Musk bought the company, indicating that ads ban appeared to have not only persisted, but escalated.

Soon after the election AdWeek came out with the news that other large brands like Comcast, IBM, Disney, Warner Bros Discovery, Lionsgate Entertainment among others have returned to advertising on X. Although, by the end of 2024, Sensor Tower told Ars that X still seemed to have failed in attracting most of the pre-acquisition Twitter’s heavy spenders back on board, making Yaccarino’s statement that “90 percent of advertisers are back on X” a bit difficult to comprehend.

Sensor Tower also revealed that “69 of the top 100 spending U.S advertisers” on Twitter/X in October 2022 had stopped advertising on the platform by December 2024. This may indicate some small improvements in the number of advertisers who had stopped spending, but the total is slightly below the September 2024 numbers that reported 72 had stopped spending. However Sensor Tower said that according to its data it has sign that X “has nurtured a pool of new advertisers instead of winning back the advertisers.” The firm discovered that half of America’s one hundred leading spenders for X in December 2024 are not advertising on pre-acquisition Twitter. For instance, Temu, which began operations before Musk’s takeover in September 2022, was the one discovered by Sensor Tower to have been X’s biggest advertiser in 2024, “responsible for 3% of the overall US ad spend in the network.”

Yaccarino said that by 2025 it would be ‘a lot higher.’

At CES, Yaccarino noted by explaining that it was these product innovations where the interest in the platform from advertisers stems: and the NFL portal as to why the best brands want to partner with the company that is transforming like X. She also spoke of an application that is expected to be out in the next “max” four or five months called TrendGenius which she described as the “perfect marketing tool “Amazing “because it links any advertisement to the trending topics in real time. These include — and other inventions, in addition to new advertiser controls to assist in the avoidance of too many obnoxious or unfortunate ad placements — help woo brands in 2025 when Yaccarino stated that ‘X’s engagement figure will be significantly more than what it was in 2024. To get to that engagement level, however Sensor Tower data shows that X will have to turn around a declining trend whereby X’s Global Daily Average Users fell down by 13 percent in the last quarter of 2024 from the previous year.

According to Sensor Tower data, X has lost a significant number of users in the two years since Musk’s acquisition firm acquired it, the marketing intelligence company said. And “while the US presidential election created some interest in X among consumers, the platform could not leverage this timely event to avoid losing more actively used in Q1 of this year than in Q3 before the election, by 6%.” Although Yaccarino said at each CES there is no surrogate for X, the rival businesses like Bluesky and Threads had users increasing by 185 percent and 22 percent correspondingly in the similar pre- and post-election period.

Threads and Bluesky probably both realized material user growth in the US because specific existing X users grew tired of the platform toward the end of the US presidential election, according to Sensor Tower. A TikTok ban could be a sweet spot for X considering if users shift to X and that’s what Sensor Tower revealed. That could possibly increase X’s younger sharing audience, especially since Yaccarino said at CES that a recent Ad Age poll shows Gen Z is currently, ‘really driving the neighborhood’ on X. The Supreme Court will consider the TikTok ban case from tomorrow forward, but free Speech enthusiasts believe that TikTok will present a significant first amendment argument to prevent the ban. What is more, without the ban, we expect that X will NEVER stop experimenting with other ways of attracting more users. During CES, Yaccarino mentioned that X is going to be building on AI assistant Grok and X Money as big launches in the year 2025.

Last year Musk and Yaccarino had pledged to launch X Money by the end of 2024, but then there was no word in December about the delay of that particular date. Also, X has not disclosed that it pulled its money transmitter app from New York in the last year. While there’s always the possibility that X Money could be rolled out on a state by state basis, Musk has stated that X Payments would be “irrelevant” if there was not a license to operate in New York.

/ Linda Yaccarino, Charman-chief Executive Officer (CEO) X Corporation formally twitter during keynote during the consumer Electronics Show (CES) Las Vegas Nevada on 7th January 2025.