Twitter Desperation Leads To New Programmatic Deal With Google

Twitter’s ad revenue has absolutely tanked since the Elon Musk takeover. Things have gotten so bad that they’ve started trying to sell their inventory via programmatic advertisers. And now they’re going to the Big Boys at Google.

X’s push into programmatic advertising continues—this time with Google.

The platform formerly known as Twitter recently started using Google Ad Manager, which lets publishers serve ads programmatically. The ads served via Google will only appear on X’s home feed.

The move comes as the company tries to boost advertiser revenue, which has fallen since Elon Musk took over the company last fall. This summer, he revealed that the platform’s ad revenue was down 50%.

“This is an opportunity for our advertisers to reach a broader audience, but as always they can choose what sites and apps their ads run on,” Farrell Sklerov, head of ads policy communications at Google, told us via email. “Any publisher who participates in this type of partnership must abide by our publisher policies.”

X partnered with ad-tech platform InMobi earlier this year, marking a major shift for the platform; previously, it hadn’t made its inventory available on the open marketplace, instead working with advertisers directly.

Its ad-tech partnerships come as X continues to try to win back advertisers following Musk’s purchase of the platform, as many left over content moderation and brand safety concerns. This spring, Musk hired Linda Yaccarino, formerly NBCUniversal’s ad sales chief, in an effort to rebuild the platform’s relationships with advertisers.

Oh how the mighty have fallen. Expect more Taboola-esque chumbox sludge to be showing up next to the porn bots and crypto scams in your Twitter feeds soon, i guess.