Sensor Tower: Twitter's top 50 advertisers spent $83M over the past two months, down from $102M YoY; Mars, AT&T, Volkswagen, and Stellantis haven't returned
Twitter-owner Elon Musk has said advertisers are returning to the social media platform, but statements from several companies …
Context & Ripple Effects
Mars was already flagged in Pathmatics' first post-takeover tally, when over a third of Twitter's top 100 clients, including Jeep, had gone quiet; by December, roughly 70% of the top 100 pre-takeover spenders weren't advertising at all. Today's Sensor Tower read shows the freeze persisting straight into Elon Musk's "advertisers are returning" phase — top-50 spend down $19M year-over-year, with Mars now joined by AT&T, Volkswagen and Stellantis among the confirmed holdouts.
The financial backdrop is already severe: GroupM clients had cut Twitter spend by 40%-50%, and Twitter's own investor update showed revenue and adjusted earnings down about 40% YoY for December. With Pathmatics putting ads at 89% of 2021 revenue, a top-50 shortfall of this size lands almost entirely on the core business.
First-order effects
- Top-50 advertiser spend fell from $102M to $83M over two months, a direct revenue hit for a business where ads were 89% of 2021 revenue.
- Mars, AT&T, Volkswagen and Stellantis' continued absence publicly contradicts Musk's claim that advertisers are returning — each is a named brand whose silence is measurable in Sensor Tower's spend data.
Second-order effects
- Agencies are converting the pullback into planning assumptions rather than treating it as a pause: GroupM's 40%-50% client cuts and Standard Media Index seeing fewer January and February bookings mean Twitter competes for a structurally smaller allocated budget each quarter.
Third-order effects
- If holdouts convert suspensions into permanent exits, the platform ends up dependent on a narrower, more price-sensitive advertiser base — a trajectory borne out when Sensor Tower later counted [[a:847326|51 of the top 100 US advertisers from October 2022 as having ceased spending on X entirely by November 2023]].
The trend: Post-takeover brand-safety concerns are turning large advertisers' Twitter suspensions into structural budget exits, shrinking the paid base faster than returning spenders can replace it.