Internal document: Twitter's US ad revenue from April 1 to the first week of May fell 59% YoY to $88M; sources say that performance is unlikely to improve soon
In internal forecasts, the company projected that ad sales would keep declining, handing a tough challenge to its new chief executive.
Context & Ripple Effects
The 59% collapse lands on a decade-long pattern of Twitter missing its own ad targets: the Q3 2016 forecast that came in well below analyst estimates, the US ad revenue running 80% under internal expectations during the World Cup's opening week last November, and the more than 500 top advertisers that had paused spending by mid-January. What changed by spring is scale — weekly shortfalls have hardened into a sustained YoY decline of $88M for a five-week stretch.
First-order effects
- Twitter's new chief executive inherits an internal forecast projecting further ad-sales decline, meaning the turnaround mandate starts from a shrinking base rather than stabilization.
- The advertisers who paused spending in late 2022 and early 2023 are still absent through April and early May, so the recovery cannot come from simply waiting out brand caution.
Second-order effects
- With ads deteriorating across regions — EMEA bookings already down 49% per internal messages — pressure builds on non-advertising revenue like Twitter Blue, which the company has reportedly delayed partly to avoid App Store fees.
- Continued declines push Twitter toward policies aimed at engagement and monetization control, such as deprioritizing external links that take users off-platform.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Twitter's business model structurally pivots from advertising-dependent to subscription- and fee-driven revenue — a rebalancing no major social platform has executed while ad demand is simultaneously exiting.
- Sustained advertiser flight tied to the platform's free-speech-maximalist moderation posture could normalize 'brand-safety exits' as a standing risk factor for any social network that loosens content rules.
The trend: Twitter's ad business is moving from cyclical misses to structural decline, forcing a pivot toward subscriptions and platform-controlled monetization as brand advertisers retreat.