Twitter Ad Revenue (2020–2025)
Twitter (recently renamed X) is currently ranked among consumers’ favorite social media platforms, but its global user base is set to fall by 3.9% in 2023, to 353.9 million.
What does this decrease signify for the micro-blogging site’s earnings? Here’s a look at Twitter’s ad revenue in recent years and how its forecast for 2023 has changed.
Twitter ad revenue in 2023: downward revision
By experts’ most recent estimates, Twitter’s advertising revenue in 2023 is expected to be $2.98 billion. Not only does this mark a 27.9% tumble from the previous year’s figures, it is also four times as much as the annual decrease in 2022. Last year, Twitter ad revenues fell by 7.2%, from $4.46 billion in 2021, to $4.14 billion.
Meanwhile, other rival social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok are all set to see their ad revenues increase in 2023.
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The expected plunge in revenue this year is a downward revision of 37% from an assessment by analysts just months earlier. In the previous forecast, experts had predicted that Twitter’s ad revenues would rise from $4.46 billion in 2021 to $4.67 billion in 2022—a 4.7% increase. This was then forecasted to rise further, by 1.5% in 2023, to $4.74 billion. This would have marked an overall increase of $280 million in Twitter ad revenues in two years.
Instead, this number is now expected to plummet by $1.48 billion. Experts have also projected continued yearly declines until at least 2025, during which Twitter’s annual ad revenue is forecast to be $2.64 billion—its lowest in at least six years.
This revision comes after the company’s acquisition by Elon Musk, which quickly saw mass resignations and layoffs of Twitter’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 recent report shows that nearly half of the top 30 advertisers on Twitter have pulled their ad efforts on the platform since 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 is the first annual decrease in at least five years. Twitter’s user base in the United States, home to the largest number of Twitter users, is also expected to fall this year by 1%, to 56.9 million.