As far as anyone can tell, X has not yet recovered from losing a lot of its advertisers, especially the big ones. It's a huge concern since ad sales are a big source of revenue for the company. As a way of encouraging advertisers to go back, the platform now has sensitivity settings that can be changed.
X's Sensitivity Control
As a way of making amends, X is now offering sensitivity controls for advertisers so they can manage where their ads show up. Through the new system, clients can now filter the kind of content they want their brand to be associated with or be adjacent with.
It will be available in the next coming weeks and can be found in X's Ads Manager. The company claims that it is an "automated solution that will help brands establish the right balance between reach and suitability" when it comes to ad placement.
Sensitivity settings will be using machine learning to reduce adjacency to different levels of content, which are relaxed, standard, and conservative. Relaxed sensitivity, which is yet to be available, will have the maximum reach while conservative, as it is worded, will have less.
The most restrictive setting will prevent ads from showing up near targeted hate speech, sexual content, gratuitous gore, excessive profanity, obscenity, spam, and drugs. Standard has the same restrictions except for obscenity, spam, and drugs.
This comes at a time when X has seen a 50% drop in ad revenue since Musk acquired the company, as mentioned by Engadget. With the loss of income and X's previous attempts at establishing new revenue streams, this seems like a desperate attempt to win advertisers back.
X has gone through a lot of compromises and policies just to regain its former standing in the ads business, apart from abandoning its owner's vision of "free speech," which is the root of most of its problems.
It's also possible that people do not want to work with the tech billionaire given his string of bad decisions with the company since he bought it. A lot of people are saying that X has been dying and that the rebranding efforts just dug a deeper hole for the company.
Musk Didn't Handle It Well the First Time
It's been months since a lot of advertisers fled the microblogging site. Instead of resolving the issue and taking back his implementation of a less restrictive platform, Musk just threatened the advertisers instead to encourage them to keep doing business with X.
At first, he blamed activists who are pressuring advertisers to drop X, as staying would result in boycotting products and services. A user suggested that Musk can "counter-boycott" them by naming and shaming the advertisers who gave in.
Musk responded to the post, saying that "a thermonuclear name & shame is exactly what will happen if this continues." Regardless of the threat, clients left X anyway. The company has not recovered on the ad sales aspect since then, which was to be expected when advertisers are threatened to stay.
