Similarweb: Twitter ad manager visits fell nearly 74% YoY in October and 85% YoY in November, the largest drop since Musk's buyout, continuing into December
Laura Forman / Wall Street Journal :
Context & Ripple Effects
Similarweb's ad-manager visit counts are a leading indicator of where brand budgets actually go, and the GroupM client cuts of 40%-50% had already shown agencies pulling money after the buyout. What the October and November numbers add is scale: a near-74% and then 85% YoY collapse in visits to the very tool advertisers use to place campaigns, still falling into December.
The investor update later confirmed the damage was real rather than a measurement artifact — Twitter reported a ~40% YoY drop in both revenue and adjusted earnings for December as advertisers fled, making this one of the clearest demand-side collapses of a major ad platform on record.
First-order effects
- Advertisers and their agencies lose confidence in the platform as a placement: with ad-manager usage down 74-85%, campaign setup activity — the precursor to booked spend — is drying up at Twitter itself, not just at third-party trackers.
- Twitter enters December with its largest advertiser exodus since the buyout, directly pressuring the ad revenue line that made up the bulk of its ~$4B 2021 business.
Second-order effects
- Agency holding companies like GroupM formalize the retreat into budget reallocation, shifting client dollars to competing platforms and cutting January-February 2023 bookings — turning a boycott-by-squeamishness into a structural budget change that outlasts any single news cycle.
- The confirmed 40% December revenue and earnings decline forces Twitter toward non-advertising revenue experiments and cost cuts to offset an ad base shrinking faster than its costs.
Third-order effects
- The pattern holds well past the crisis window: Guideline data shows X's monthly US ad revenue down 55%+ YoY in every month from the takeover through August 2023 (ten straight months), suggesting advertiser flight became a durable repricing of platform risk rather than a temporary pause.
- Traffic erosion compounds the ad problem — Similarweb's later reading of falling traffic, web visitors, and Android DAUs through March 2023 points to a smaller audience meeting fewer advertisers, a feedback loop that reshapes X from mass-reach ad platform toward a niche, subscription-and-politics-weighted business.
The trend: Major social platforms are discovering that advertiser trust, once repriced downward after ownership or moderation shocks, does not quickly return — X's post-buyout ad collapse is the sharpest data point yet in the decoupling of big-name platforms from brand ad budgets.