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Are you still running ads on X, the social media site owned by Elon Musk that was formerly known as Twitter? If so, you may have gotten an email announcing the company’s decision to discontinue Promoted Accounts, one of its most established advertising services.
X’s advertising clients were notified via email that the Promoted Accounts function, also known as “Follower Objective” ads, is being discontinued, as was first reported by Axios on Tuesday. The call-to-action for these text-based advertisements, which are displayed in the timeline feed with a Follow button, is to merely follow the user rather than promoting any specific content.
This decision by X is puzzling given that, according to an Axios source familiar with X’s operations, the ad format typically brought in more than $100 million in income for the platform each year.
Although these advertisements were “simple to sell,” according to the study, they were not considered in the platform’s long-term goals. Static-type advertisements like Promoted Accounts are being phased out as Musk places more of an emphasis on media like videos. Advertisers are still able to use these ad kinds as of the time of publication.
There won’t likely be much of an effect on users from the removal of these advertisements. My own experience as a seasoned platform user showed that Promoted Accounts frequently came across as spam and infrequently catered to my interests.
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Nonetheless, it was clear that they worked for the company and, at the very least, some of its advertising.
The choice to eliminate an ad format that was generating hundreds of millions of dollars in income for the corporation, however, is the more intriguing fact in this story.
This is significant because it confirms Elon Musk’s authority in this situation.
Yaccarino made it clear in a recent interview with CNBC that she was responsible for managing the “business” aspect of the company while Musk handled the development of the tech products. Yaccarino’s expertise is exclusively in the advertising sector.
But, the source for Axios claims that Musk and his product team were the ones to make this particular choice for the company’s revenue-generating advertising division.
The corporation has made some significant advertising decisions recently, but this is hardly the first one. The platform has launched new brand-specific advertising tools in an effort to boost its ad revenue, which plummeted after Musk bought the business.
In order to give marketers more control over the kind of material their ads would appear next to, X released a “sensitivity settings” tool last week. However, as was initially seen last month, X appears to continue experimenting with its ad labeling forms, which clearly identify paid advertisements for consumers.
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Source: Mashable
