Social media company X, formerly known as Twitter, will no longer allow advertisers to promote their accounts within the platform’s timeline to attract new followers, Axios reported on Tuesday, citing an email to advertising clients.
Promoted accounts, or “Follower Objective” ads, generate more than $100 million (roughly Rs. 831 crore) annually in global revenue for X, according to the report.
X did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
Advertisers largely rely on promoted follower ads to drive business on the platform and target certain audiences.
CEO Linda Yaccarino, the former advertising chief at NBCUniversal, has been trying to rebrand the company’s image since she started as CEO on June 5 and bring back advertisers who left the platform after Elon Musk’s changes.
Earlier this month, X was fined $350,000 (nearly Rs. 3 crore) by the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which said that the social media firm delayed complying with the US special counsel investigating Donald Trump. The counsel had obtained a search warrant for the former president’s Twitter account in January.
In July, Musk said that monthly users of X reached a “new high” and shared a graph that showed the latest count as over 540 million.
Musk’s post on X about the user figures came as the company goes through organisational changes and looks to boost advertising revenue, which has dropped in recent months.
Twitter had 229 million monthly active users in May 2022, according to a statement made before Musk’s purchase of the firm in October. Musk posted in November that X had 259.4 million daily active users.
© Thomson Reuters 2023
