Former NBCU advert exec Linda Yaccarino’s tenure at X could have been pretty quick — simply two years from begin to end — however she did handle to make an impression on the social community’s advert enterprise, new knowledge from advert intelligence agency Guideline exhibits. Yaccarino shall be leaving X in a greater place with its advertisers than she discovered it, it says.
Within the U.S., advert spending was up 62% year-over-year within the first half of 2025, Guideline notes. As well as, Yaccarino beforehand claimed that 96% of X’s advertisers returned to X as of Could 2025.
Nevertheless, it took time for X’s promoting enterprise to show round, and it remains a turbulent business.
Yaccarino’s departure might have a major impression on X’s profitability, as the corporate is nowhere close to able to rely fully on different income streams. Its X Premium subscriptions, for instance, solely account for a small portion of its enterprise, and it hasn’t but launched its broader ambitions round an X Cash funds service.
Yaccarino first joined X in June 2023 after spending practically 12 years at NBCUniversal, the place she had been chairman of world promoting and partnerships. On the time, X (then referred to as Twitter) was going through a crucial promoting downturn.
Lots of the preliminary cuts to advert spend had been prompted by Elon Musk’s takeover of the community in October 2022. With cuts to Twitter employees, together with its Belief and Security division, misinformation and hate speech proliferated — which advertisers needed nothing to do with. Reuters famous that 14 of the 30 prime advertisers stopped all their advertising on the platform, and 4 advertisers had decreased their spending from 92% to 98.7% round that point.
Guideline’s knowledge discovered that 89% of Twitter/X’s U.S. advert {dollars} had been eroded within the two years between Q3 2022 and Q3 2024. (These declines had truly begun in Q2 2022, after it was revealed that Musk purchased a 9.4% stake within the firm, the agency advised TechCrunch through e mail.)
By early 2023, reports surfaced that greater than 500 of Twitter’s advertisers had left the platform, and fourth-quarter revenues dropped by 35%.
Citing inner paperwork, The New York Instances reported that the social community’s U.S. ad business was down 59% from a year earlier, from the 5 weeks between April 1 and the primary week of Could 2023, reaching $88 million. Its weekly gross sales projections had been additionally down by as a lot as 30%. X then tried luring advertisers again with advert credit.
There have been hints that Yaccarino was working behind the scenes to restore issues, although.
A yr after she joined X, the Instances reported that 65% of advertisers had returned, citing recordings of inner conferences on the firm. In August 2023, Yaccarino claimed that X’s operational run price was near “break even.”
However the state of affairs worsened once more that yr with an advertiser boycott.
In November 2023, manufacturers together with Apple, Disney, and IBM paused their advert spending on X within the wake of Musk’s endorsement of an antisemitic submit. The social community was already on monitor for a virtually 55% year-over-year decline in worldwide advert spending, in accordance with eMarketer estimates, and this boycott threatened to worsen the state of affairs additional.
Musk had additionally been a problem for Yaccarino throughout her time with the corporate. The X proprietor and SpaceX exec famously advised X advertisers leaving to “go fuck your self,” calling their departure a type of blackmail. When cursing at them didn’t work, X sued as an alternative, saying theirs was an “unlawful boycott.” (The go well with was expanded in early 2025 to incorporate extra advertisers, akin to LEGO and Shell.)
The specter of litigation labored — corporations together with Verizon and Ralph Lauren resumed advertising on the platform after receiving legal threats, The Wall Road Journal reported in June 2025. The World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) additionally suspended the operations of its World Alliance for Accountable Media (GARM) nonprofit after the lawsuit was filed in opposition to it.
Guideline’s knowledge additionally signifies that X has seen elevated U.S. advert spend since December 2024 — the primary time since Musk purchased the corporate, it says. From Q3 2024 to This fall 2024, spending was up 37.7%, influenced by the U.S. presidential elections.
Throughout Yaccarino’s time, X additionally made strikes to make sure extra model security, partnering with adtech corporations DoubleVerify and Integral Advert Science (IAS) to warn them if adverts had been positioned round inappropriate content material. It additionally supplied manufacturers instruments to regulate the sensitivity of the place their adverts had been displayed on the app, the place extra “relaxed” advert slots would value much less, and people with larger security considerations would pay extra. Later, X launched methods for advertisers to run their adverts subsequent to a curated set of content material creators.
None of this has stopped X from being a controversial platform with regard to advert security.
This week, for example, the location’s AI bot Grok went off the rails after experiencing antisemitic outbursts requiring X to take it offline. Now, as an alternative of going through one other advert disaster, Yaccarino is leaving — though her resolution was reportedly made previous to the Grok incident.