Former NBCU advert exec Linda Yaccarino’s tenure at X can have been moderately brief — simply two years from begin to end — however she did organize to make an have an effect on at the social community’s advert trade, new information from advert intelligence company Tenet presentations. Yaccarino shall be leaving X in a greater place with its advertisers than she discovered it, it says.
Within the U.S., advert spending used to be up 62% year-over-year within the first part of 2025, Tenet notes. As well as, Yaccarino up to now claimed that 96% of X’s advertisers returned to X as of Might 2025.
On the other hand, it took time for X’s promoting trade to show round, and it stays a turbulent trade.
Yaccarino’s departure can have an important have an effect on on X’s profitability, as the corporate is nowhere close to in a position to depend solely on different income streams. Its X Top class subscriptions, as an example, best account for a small portion of its trade, and it hasn’t but introduced its broader ambitions round an X Cash bills provider.
Yaccarino first joined X in June 2023 after spending just about 12 years at NBCUniversal, the place she were chairman of world promoting and partnerships. On the time, X (then referred to as Twitter) used to be going through a crucial promoting downturn.
Most of the preliminary cuts to advert spend had been caused through Elon Musk’s takeover of the community in October 2022. With cuts to Twitter personnel, together with its Accept as true with and Protection department, incorrect information and hate speech proliferated — which advertisers sought after not anything to do with. Reuters famous that 14 of the 30 best advertisers scrowned all their promoting at the platform, and 4 advertisers had decreased their spending from 92% to 98.7% round that point.
Tenet’s information discovered that 89% of Twitter/X’s U.S. advert greenbacks had been eroded within the two years between Q3 2022 and Q3 2024. (Those declines had in reality begun in Q2 2022, after it used to be published that Musk purchased a 9.4% stake within the corporate, the company advised TechCrunch by the use of e-mail.)
By way of early 2023, studies surfaced that greater than 500 of Twitter’s advertisers had left the platform, and fourth-quarter revenues dropped through 35%.
Bringing up inside paperwork, The New York Occasions reported that the social community’s U.S. advert trade used to be down 59% from a 12 months previous, from the 5 weeks between April 1 and the primary week of Might 2023, attaining $88 million. Its weekly gross sales projections had been additionally down through up to 30%. X then attempted luring advertisers again with advert credit.
There have been hints that Yaccarino used to be operating in the back of the scenes to fix issues, regardless that.
A 12 months after she joined X, the Occasions reported that 65% of advertisers had returned, mentioning recordings of inside conferences on the corporate. In August 2023, Yaccarino claimed that X’s operational run fee used to be with regards to “smash even.”
However the scenario worsened once more that 12 months 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 used to be already not off course for a just about 55% year-over-year decline in international advert spending, in line with eMarketer estimates, and this boycott threatened to aggravate the placement additional.
Musk had additionally been a problem for Yaccarino right through her time with the corporate. The X proprietor and SpaceX exec famously advised X advertisers leaving to “move fuck your self,” calling their departure a type of blackmail. When cursing at them didn’t paintings, X sued as a substitute, announcing theirs used to be an “unlawful boycott.” (The swimsuit used to be expanded in early 2025 to incorporate extra advertisers, comparable to LEGO and Shell.)
The specter of litigation labored — firms together with Verizon and Ralph Lauren resumed promoting at the platform after receiving criminal threats, The Wall Boulevard Magazine reported in June 2025. The International Federation of Advertisers (WFA) additionally suspended the operations of its World Alliance for Accountable Media (GARM) nonprofit after the lawsuit used to be filed in opposition to it.
Tenet’s information additionally signifies that X has observed larger 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 used to be up 37.7%, influenced through the U.S. presidential elections.
All over Yaccarino’s time, X additionally made strikes to make sure extra logo protection, partnering with adtech firms DoubleVerify and Integral Advert Science (IAS) to warn them if commercials had been positioned round beside the point content material. It additionally introduced manufacturers equipment to regulate the sensitivity of the place their commercials had been displayed at the app, the place extra “comfortable” advert slots would price much less, and the ones with upper protection considerations would pay extra. Later, X presented techniques for advertisers to run their commercials subsequent to a curated set of content material creators.
None of this has stopped X from being a arguable platform with reference to advert protection.
This week, as an example, the website’s AI bot Grok went off the rails after experiencing antisemitic outbursts requiring X to take it offline. Now, as a substitute of going through some other advert disaster, Yaccarino is leaving — despite the fact that her choice used to be reportedly made previous to the Grok incident.
