Twitter's advertising business seen facing slow recovery
Business
Twitter's top 10 advertisers before Musk are no longer even in the top 50 advertisers
(Reuters) - Twitter-owner Elon Musk has said advertisers are returning to the social media platform, but statements from several companies and data from research firms suggest a bounce-back is not happening so fast.
Musk, who also runs electric carmaker Tesla Inc., earlier this week told the BBC that most of Twitter's advertisers are returning to the platform and the business was "roughly breaking even." Twitter had been hit by a massive decline in advertising since his acquisition in late October.
However, several companies, including snack maker Mondelez International, consumer products company Unilever, and Coca-Cola, that had been among Twitter's top 10 advertisers before Musk took over, are no longer even in the top 50 advertisers in the past two months, according to data compiled by Sensor Tower.
Mondelez, Unilever and Coke did not respond to requests for comment. Mondelez CEO Dirk Van de Put told Reuters last fall the Oreo maker had pulled its ads from Twitter because of the risk they would appear next to the "wrong messages," including hate speech.
The top 50 advertisers on Twitter spent a combined $83 million over the past two months, down from $102 million in the same period last year, according to Sensor Tower, a market intelligence firm.
Research firm Insider Intelligence this week slashed its forecast for Twitter's global ad revenue this year by 37% to $2.98 billion. That would represent a 28% decline from Twitter's 2022 ad revenue of $4.14 billion.
