X Offers Discounts and Incentives to Win Back Advertisers

X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, is reportedly trying to gain back advertisers.

The platform is now offering discounted prices and a new set of incentives to encourage brands to come back, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported Tuesday (July 25), citing emails it had viewed.

For example, X is offering 50% off any new bookings of video ads that run alongside a list of trending topics in its Explore tab along with other discounts, according to the report. It is also warning brands that their account will no longer be verified if they don’t meet the required spend of $1,000 in the past 30 days or $6,000 in the past 180 days.

This isn’t the first time the platform has tried to attract advertisers with cheaper pricing, having also done so around the time of the Super Bowl, the report said. Some brands such as Mondelez International have returned to spending on the platform, but X is still far from its goal.

Although the effects of these new incentives are yet to be seen, some advertisers are more hopeful than before because of the addition of new CEO Linda Yaccarino, who was previously NBCUniversal’s head of advertising. Some ad buyers believe Yaccarino is a “known quantity” who understands brands and their desire for stability and content moderation.

X recently got pushback from the ad industry when it limited the amount of posts that users can read in what it said was an effort to stop other companies from scraping data from the platform, per the report. This plan backfired on the company as ad engagement decreased. The firm has since eased the limits.

The company pulled the trigger on its rebranding effort — from Twitter to X — on Monday (July 24) when, after months of speculation, owner Elon Musk confirmed that its blue bird logo will be replaced with a simple “X.”

The move is part of a wider strategy by Musk to turn the platform into what he has called an “everything app.”

In other news in the social media space, it was reported Friday (July 21) that Twitter’s new competitor, the Meta-owned Threads, saw its user engagement continue to decline in the second week since its launch. In addition, the number of daily active users on Threads has dropped 70% since its peak, to 13 million.

Twitter has 200 million daily active users.