Email: X no longer lets advertisers promote accounts within the platform's timeline to gain followers; a source says Follower Objective ads made $100M+ annually
X, the company formerly known as Twitter, will no longer allow advertisers to promote their accounts within the platform's timeline …
Context & Ripple Effects
X was already reshaping its advertising and creator economics: it offered discounts on new video ads while tying verified status to ad-spending thresholds in a push for video-ad spending, and it lowered the bar for creator ad-revenue sharing.
Removing follower-growth placements matters because the format was reportedly a meaningful revenue line, rather than a minor product cleanup. It also narrows a straightforward way for brands and publishers to build an audience inside X.
First-order effects
- Advertisers can no longer buy timeline distribution specifically to gain followers, forcing campaigns that used that objective to shift to other available ad formats or organic account growth.
- X gives up a product that a source said generated more than $100 million annually, while potentially reducing low-quality or artificially amplified account growth tied to paid acquisition.
Second-order effects
- Video and other remaining X ad products become more important substitutes for marketers seeking reach, making prior discounted video-ad offers more consequential to campaign planning.
- Publishers, creators, and brands that treated follower growth as a measurable acquisition target have less reason to concentrate that budget on X if alternative objectives cannot deliver comparable audience building.
Third-order effects
- If X continues to remove established ad objectives while revising creator payouts, its monetization mix may tilt away from conventional social-ad buying toward formats and incentives it can more tightly control.
- The change is part of a broader tension in social platforms: efforts to curb low-quality account amplification can also remove paid growth tools that supported advertiser and publisher participation.
The trend: X is recalibrating platform incentives by replacing or restricting familiar advertising mechanics while linking more of its ecosystem to controlled monetization and verification signals.