Confessions of a crypto strategy exec who wants to spend ad money on X, but can’t

By Krystal Scanlon • October 28, 2025 •

For the most part, it’s nearly impossible to find advertisers that are spending a substantial amount of their social budgets on X. But more niche industries, such as crypto, see X the same way traditional advertisers view Meta and Google – their audience is there, it delivers good results. It’s a no brainer.

Or at least should be. In this edition of our Confessions series, where we trade anonymity for candor, the chief strategy officer of a crypto firm talks through the frustrating issues they’ve had with X over the past eight months, which has ultimately meant the lion’s share of their social budget has nowhere to go.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

You typically spend the bulk of your budget on X?

Yes, we’re a decent client for X, and have been even before Elon Musk’s takeover. From a performance advertising perspective, over the last three years, about 70% of our budget has gone to X (The exec didn’t share specific figures).

So it’s a pretty big deal. Can you talk through what’s been happening?

From September 2024 until end of March / early April 2025, we were in a business as usual phase. We were doing different ad creatives, but it was basically a case of copy previous campaign, change dates, copy and image, ship. And then one day X’s ad platform started delivering zero impressions.

Did you contact X about it?

We tried things internally before we contacted X in May, but we’ve had to chase it down. It took until late June until we were finally able to run an ad again. But we haven’t been able to run ads since then. So we’re not spending any more budget until they fix it, which is frustrating.

What’s actually gone wrong?

X’s system didn’t generate an invoice. The ad platform said we’ve got no impressions, no spend, no invoice. Whatever we tried, it wouldn’t generate. So the platform thought we had no budget. For some reason it hadn’t logged some previous spend, so it didn’t generate an invoice – and that’s prevented anything else moving forward.

Has X managed to solve it?

We’ve been chasing X weekly, but no. The only responses we get are: “It’s been escalated to the tech team, I’ll get back to you tomorrow”. But we don’t hear back until we chase again four days later to ask what’s happening. But we’re back to square one because the next response is, “Sorry, we haven’t heard anything. Is the issue still going on?”

We have a budget. We want to spend it on X, but can’t. All we want is for this to be fixed, but we’re getting nowhere.

You mentioned you could run ads again in late June?

Out of nowhere, the system spouted out an invoice for $90. We ran some ads, then the platform spat out a correct bill for those ads we ran for about a week. That was processed. But the following day, it then spat out a bill for about 20 times what the actual billing period was for. It didn’t match up to anything in our billing or on the dashboards. Thankfully, our card system refused the payment because it was so far out of normal bounds.

At least it hasn’t taken more budget

The whole saga has had knock-on effects though. Through X’s affiliate business we get ad credits. And because part of the bill got paid out of our ad credits, it wiped out a year’s worth of our ad credits in one go. So while we haven’t lost money, we have lost all those ad credits that we’d normally be using.

The account team says they’re just sales and not tech support. The ad team can’t fix the ad credits until the invoice has been paid or cancelled. I’m sure if we just paid this over-the-top invoice and received a refund for it, that might fix the problem. But we shouldn’t have to pay the incorrect bill. We just want the system to work, and to spend our budget on the platform.

Does X know about this or done anything to help?

Their first response was ‘there’s nothing wrong with the system’. We’ve sent screenshots to prove it, repeatedly chasing. After about two weeks, we got a response finally stating it’s an error, telling us to get a refund. I questioned it saying, are you sure we need to go through that process, because it’s not taken our money? But we’ve still not had any reply to that. We’re back in the loop of weekly chasing.

The last update I got was to say they’ve escalated it to X’s CFO, and if he can’t fix it, the only further escalation they have, is Elon [Musk].

What do you make of that?

No money has changed hands. It’s not CFO-bothering level. It is not even a senior finance matter. It’s a tech issue. Any other major platform would simply write it off and get us back on track.

If your advertiser category is one of the top spenders on X, I’d have thought that’d get you priority support with this sort of issue

I suspect the issue is that they have completely gutted middle management. The new ad tech team seems to be junior account managers whose job is to send out IOs, get them signed, answer basic questions. I don’t think they can do anything else. It seems like they don’t really have anyone above them to escalate to, who can actually do anything to resolve these issues. They probably are escalating internally, but that escalation goes nowhere. So we’re just stuck.

In credit to them, some of the things they’ve implemented are really great, like verified organizations and affiliate accounts. But there’s no one on the ad tech side. It comes across like this is clearly not where they see revenue growing.

If you have any insights to share about X, or any other platform, or if you’re a current or former employee of any of the platforms, contact Krystal Scanlon securely using a non-work device on Signal: @krystalscanlon.27, email: krystal@digiday.com or via LinkedIn.