X upgrades its ad platform in long overdue overhaul

While X has not detailed the full scope of specific features or system-level changes expected, the team does expect that the full ads platform should be ready “later this year,” X’s global head of advertising Monique Pintarelli said. It’s a direct extension of X’s broader integration with xAI, and is currently in testing with a select group of advertisers.

The logic being that the lower the friction for campaign setup, the easier it is for advertisers to spend. It’s the same calculation driving Google, Meta and OpenAI to make near-identical moves. At platform scale, a better ads manager isn’t a product improvement — it’s a revenue lever. 

It’s also addressing a structural platform for X. Since Musk’s takeover four years ago. Advertisers that pulled spend have been consistent about one thing: even before the acquisition, the platform’s ad tools were rudimentary by market standards. Leaving wasn’t painful.

“Historically, even when X was known as Twitter, it was not a major priority due to its lack of competitive performance,” Mindgruve’s group media director Haley Feazell told Digiday in 2024.

That’s the gap the overhaul is really trying to close. Whether it can is another matter. 

“X has struggled to keep up with its peers in direct-response advertising, and its returns have been subpar,” said Zeno Group’s svp paid social Shamsul Chowdhury. 

Subpar might be a bit of an understatement if the platform’s CPM trajectory tells the story. The average CPM for X in 2026 so far is around $0.64, according to data from Gupta Media. That’s down from about $1.05 in 2025, and $2.23 in 2024. To compare: CPMs on Facebook average around $4.93 this year so far, Instagram Reels has an average of $3.95, TikTok sees a $3.12 CPM, and YouTube sits around $3.82.

It speaks to how advertisers still view the platform, which has been mired in controversies since Musk took over. This year alone, the platform’s Grok AI model generated sexualised images of women and minors in what became one of the most damaging episodes in the platform’s post-acquisition history, promoting regulatory investigations in the U.K. and Europe. Despite those controversies, senior executives have repeatedly insisted that perceptions have shifted and spending with them. 

X’s Pintarelli told Digiday back in January that nearly all of X’s top 100 advertisers had returned to the platform. While no specific figures were shared, X did state that according to its internal figures, the company was on track to generate between $2.9 billion and $3.1 billion at the end of 2025. However, eMarketer’s forecasts have been a little more modest. Last year, the company forecast X to land on around $2.26 billion for 2025, and increase that by 8.9% to $2.46 billion in 2026, and a further 7.2% to $2.64 billion in 2027.

“Most brands want confidence that their media investment aligns with their values as well as their performance goals,” said Mark Byrne, director of paid media at Brave Bison. “For some advertisers, it extends beyond brand safety in the traditional sense into whether they want to be seen supporting certain environments at all. That makes controls, exclusions and transparency more important than ever.”