X's Latest Filings Just Confirmed Ad Revenue Is Still Way Below Twitter's Peak. Australia's Share Is Now Barely Visible.
SpaceX's S-1 filing showed X generated US$1.8B in 2025 ad revenue. Twitter's last public year was US$4.7B. The category did not shrink. X did. Australian brands have been quietly reallocating budget for two years.
X is profitable in 2025. It is also smaller than the business that used to lose money. The pricing power moved.
SpaceX's S-1 filing this week handed the industry an actual revenue number for X. The platform generated US$1.8 billion in advertising in 2025, up modestly from US$1.7 billion in 2024 but still well short of the US$4.7 billion Twitter earned in its last public year.
The line that matters is the trend, not the headline. X has spent three years rebuilding from the post-acquisition advertiser exodus, and the floor has stabilised. The ceiling has not. The platform's share of US digital advertising sat at roughly 1% in Q1 2026, down from close to 10% in 2016.
B&T's analysis put a sharper point on it. Twitter at its peak commanded conversations across news, sport and culture that translated into mid-tier digital ad revenue. X today commands a different audience and a different brand-safety risk profile. Most major advertisers have not returned at the spend level they were running at five years ago.
Why it matters
Australian agencies and brands quietly cut X budgets over the last 24 months and reallocated to LinkedIn, Reddit and Meta. The S-1 filing now gives that decision a number to defend. When a CFO asks why a platform that still has scale gets so little of the media budget, the answer is that the platform has 38% of its former ad revenue and shrinking share.
The other implication is for B2B brands that quietly held a presence. The argument for keeping a thin always-on layer was reach. With the audience composition changing and the brand-safety surface area higher than competitors, the always-on layer is harder to defend. Most Australian B2B brands now run X as a customer-service channel, not a media channel.
X Corp 2025 ad revenue versus Twitter's last public year. The category did not shrink. The platform did.
What to do about it
This is a budget hygiene moment.
Review every X line item in your annual plan. If it was inherited from a 2022 always-on layer, kill it or refresh the brief.
Reallocate the spend to a channel with proven 2026 performance. Reddit and LinkedIn are the obvious B2B picks. Meta Reels is the obvious B2C one.
Move customer service off the channel if the volume is low. Two posts a week with zero engagement is not a customer service strategy.
Stop using we have to be there reasoning. If the brand can defend a presence, the presence should be paid for. If it cannot, the presence is a sunk cost.
Pull the data quarterly. Share by platform is moving fast. The decision you made in January is already old.
X's stabilisation at a smaller base is the lesson, not the headline. Big platforms can shrink. Marketing teams that keep paying for legacy reach end up funding their own irrelevance.