When Elon Musk completed a $44 billion purchase of Twitter in October 2022, two predictions dominated the advertising industry. The first was that brand safety concerns would trigger an advertiser exodus X could not survive. The second was that users would flee to rivals like Threads and Bluesky, hollowing out the audience. Nearly four years later, the data tells a more complicated story. Neither prediction fully materialized, but neither was entirely wrong. X has survived, partially recovered, and retained a unique audience no other platform replicates. It has also accumulated debt that keeps it unprofitable, lost global users for the first time since its founding, and watched advertiser trust for three consecutive years. For businesses deciding where to put their social advertising dollars, the assessment sits somewhere between the doom narrative and the comeback story.
Did Users Actually Leave X?
Threads grew fast. Meta’s platform reached 400 million monthly active users by August 2025, according to TechCrunch, and by January 2026 had surpassed X in daily mobile users, 141.5 million to 125 million. Bluesky grew too, tripling its user base to roughly 43 million registered users by late 2025. But its daily active user base remains a fraction of its registered total, and average post engagements sit at 21, compared to 328 on X.
X itself lost ground globally. Monthly active users fell roughly 4.9% year-over-year to approximately 557 million, the platform’s first sustained decline since the acquisition. But Comscore data tells a different story about the US market specifically. According to eMarketer’s analysis of Comscore Media Metrix figures, US unique visitors to X held essentially flat between June 2025 and March 2026, ranging from 127.3 million to 132.8 million — while Threads dropped from 12.5 million to 7.1 million US unique visitors over the same period, and Bluesky fell from 2.7 million to 1.5 million.
Advertiser Trust Has Not Improved
On advertiser sentiment, the situation has gotten worse, not better. Twenty nine percent of marketers plan to decrease spend on X, up from 26% the year before, with nearly one in eight planning to exit entirely. Kantar ranked X last among all global ad platforms for trust for the third consecutive year.
Brand safety on X remains contested. While X and third-party verification firms say measured campaigns meet industry benchmarks, many marketers remain skeptical. Brands are managing association risk alongside placement risk, and those are harder to separate.
The advertiser return also deserves scrutiny. eMarketer’s principal analyst Jasmine Enberg told Yahoo Finance that many advertisers may view spending on X as a cost of doing business to avoid potential legal or financial repercussions. The Financial Times reported that brands allocated small budget portions to X specifically to avoid being seen as part of a boycott. Social Media Today reported that X lawyers contacted IPG, hinting its pending merger with Omnicom could face regulatory pressure, after which IPG signed a new spending deal. Verizon and Ralph Lauren returned after receiving warnings they could be added to an antitrust lawsuit.
Advertisers returning under legal pressure is not the same as advertisers returning because the platform earned their confidence.
The X Revenue Comeback Has an Asterisk
Twitter generated $4.4 billion in revenue in 2022, its last full year before the acquisition. By 2024, that had fallen to $2.6 billion, a decline of more than 40%. Ad revenue reached $1.8 billion in 2025, up 7% from the previous year but still well below pre-acquisition levels. Subscriptions hit $1 billion in annualized recurring revenue. And X receives a data payment from xAI for training data, estimated at $500 million in 2025 rising to $2 billion in 2026. That payment is an internal transfer between companies Musk controls, not a market-validated transaction. It keeps X solvent while the ad business rebuilds, but it is not evidence of standalone financial health.
X is still losing money. The platform posted a $577 million net loss in Q3 2025, driven by over $1 billion in annual interest payments on the acquisition debt. Advertisers are working with a platform that is recovering, not recovered, and whose solvency depends partly on its owner’s other businesses.
What X Still Does That No Other Platform Does
The case for X is its audience composition. X retains a concentration of journalists, policymakers, and financial professionals who drive public conversation. Roughly half of X users pay attention to news from mainstream outlets and journalists. No other text-based social platform has replicated this. Threads skews lifestyle. Bluesky is a fraction of the size with minimal engagement outside its core community.
Average ROI runs $2.70 per dollar spent, about 40% above the cross-media average but below social media averages. But X delivers 40% higher returns compared to other platforms in certain campaign contexts, particularly for time-sensitive and culturally resonant campaigns. The advertiser mix has also shifted toward financial services, software, sports, gaming, and direct-to-consumer brands using X for performance objectives. For those categories, the audience fits.
What Advertisers Should Do
Four years of data, two failed predictions, and one very complicated recovery later, advertisers still face a practical question: what do you actually do with X? X remains controversial. Should you choose to advertise on X:
Size X as a Specialty Channel, Not a Core Social Buy
It delivers a specific audience for specific objectives. Financial services, B2B technology, media, and DTC brands with performance goals have the strongest case. Consumer packaged goods brands and mass-market retailers have less.
Concentrate X Spend Around Time-Sensitive Moments
X performs best when the campaign matches the platform’s real-time nature. News cycles, product launches, live events, and earnings announcements create concentrated audience attention that broader platforms cannot replicate. Advertisers who align their X spend with those moments, rather than running always-on campaigns, are most likely to see the returns the platform is capable of delivering.
Explore Creator Partnerships as an Alternative to Direct Advertising
X has built a functioning creator economy, with meaningful payouts that have attracted and retained content creators across categories. For brands where direct ad placement on X feels too risky, partnering with creators who already have established audiences on the platform is a lower-friction entry point, and one that sidesteps the brand safety concerns that make direct buying complicated.
Treat Association Risk as a Separate Question From Placement Risk
If your CMO or board would have a problem with brand association with the platform’s ownership, that is a legitimate business consideration. Conflating it with ad placement quality produces decisions that satisfy neither constraint.
Test Threads Before the CPM Window Closes
If X’s brand safety environment or political association risk makes it untenable for your organization, Threads is the most practical place to redirect text-based social budget. Early advertiser data puts Threads CPMs in the $3 to $8 range, well below Instagram’s $6 to $18, and any existing Meta advertiser can add Threads as a placement without new infrastructure. That pricing reflects a thin auction that will not stay thin. The brands that establish Threads placements now will learn the platform’s performance patterns before CPMs normalize upward.
X Survived. Now What?
X in 2026 is neither the failed experiment its critics predicted nor the recovered platform its owner claims. It is a platform with a distinct and valuable audience, a partially rebuilt ad business, improving technical brand safety, and ownership dynamics that require advertisers to think about more than CPMs. Businesses best positioned on X understand what it actually is, budget it for what it can do, and manage the variables that come with it.
Want to build a smarter social advertising strategy? Contact True Interactive. We know how to make every platform decision count.
Image source: Alexander Shatov, Unsplash
