Former NBCU ad exec Linda Yaccarino’s tenure at X may have been fairly short — just two years from start to finish — but she did manage to make an impact on the social network’s ad business, new data from ad intelligence firm Guideline shows. Yaccarino will be leaving X in a better position with its advertisers than she found it, it says.
In the U.S., ad spending was up 62% year-over-year in the first half of 2025, Guideline notes. In addition, Yaccarino previously claimed that 96% of X’s advertisers returned to X as of May 2025.
However, it took time for X’s advertising business to turn around, and it remains a turbulent business.
Yaccarino’s departure could have a significant impact on X’s profitability, as the company is nowhere near ready to rely entirely on other revenue streams. Its X Premium subscriptions, for example, only account for a small portion of its business, and it hasn’t yet launched its broader ambitions around an X Money payments service.
Yaccarino first joined X in June 2023 after spending nearly 12 years at NBCUniversal, where she had been chairman of global advertising and partnerships. At the time, X (then called Twitter) was facing a critical advertising downturn.
Many of the initial cuts to ad spend were prompted by Elon Musk’s takeover of the network in October 2022. With cuts to Twitter staff, including its Trust and Safety division, misinformation and hate speech proliferated — which advertisers wanted nothing to do with. Reuters noted that 14 of the 30 top advertisers stopped all their advertising on the platform, and four advertisers had reduced their spending from 92% to 98.7% around that time.
Guideline’s data found that 89% of Twitter/X’s U.S. ad dollars were eroded in the two years between Q3 2022 and Q3 2024. (These declines had actually begun in Q2 2022, after it was revealed that Musk bought a 9.4% stake in the company, the firm told TechCrunch via email.)
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By early 2023, reports surfaced that more than 500 of Twitter’s advertisers had left the platform, and fourth-quarter revenues dropped by 35%.
Citing internal documents, The New York Times reported that the social network’s U.S. ad business was down 59% from a year earlier, from the five weeks between April 1 and the first week of May 2023, reaching $88 million. Its weekly sales projections were also down by as much as 30%. X then tried luring advertisers back with ad credits.
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