Elon Musk’s X has signed up a new adtech partner as it looks to boost advertising revenue

Elon Musk owns X, which has faced challenges with advertisers since his takeover.

Elon Musk’s X has signed up the adtech company PubMatic as an authorized seller of its ads, as it looks to outside companies to help boost ad revenue, B-17 has learned.

PubMatic is a supply-side platform that helps the publishers of websites, apps, e-commerce sites, and streaming-TV providers generate revenue from advertising.

A spokesperson for PubMatic declined to comment for this article but pointed B-17 to comments about the partnership with X made by the adtech company’s chief executive, Rajeev Goel, on its earnings call last week.

“Historically, X had only accessed social-media ad budgets,” Goel said on the call, according to a transcript provided to B-17 by the market intelligence service AlphaSense.

“They selected PubMatic as an SSP partner, opening up their traditionally closed ecosystem to tap into the $26 billion in open internet native display and video ad spend,” Goel added.

X did not respond to a request for comment.

PubMatic joins Google and InMobi on X’s Ads.txt file, a page where publishers display the third-party vendors allowed to sell their ads.

Before Musk’s takeover (and the company’s renaming to X), Twitter didn’t open up its ad inventory to outside vendors, instead brokering deals with advertisers directly.

By opening up to the so-called open marketplace, X can theoretically tap into a bigger pool of potential advertisers — though it’s likely these ads would be sold at lower prices than directly sold deals, and X would have to share some of the revenue with its adtech vendors.

While InMobi is listed as a seller of X ads on its Ads.txt file, the company hasn’t offered ads on X to its clients for more than a year, a person familiar with the matter told B-17. They asked for anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly about the partnership. Their identity is known to B-17. InMobi declined to comment.

X is attempting to turn around a steep decline in its advertising business since Musk’s takeover, and it appears to have made at least some progress following Trump’s election victory.

Data analyzed this week from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower found that X had achieved an 800% spike in revenue among its top 100 advertisers in the week after the election on November 6, compared with the week prior. Still, ad dollars flowing to X from these advertisers were down 64% compared to the same period in 2022, a month after Musk became Twitter’s owner, per Sensor Tower’s data.

Many advertisers have been wary of X since the company laid off large numbers of its sales and safety staffers and brought back some previously banned accounts to the platform.

X is also suing some of its advertisers, alleging they illegally colluded in violation of competition law to boycott the platform after Musk’s takeover. This week, X added the Amazon-owned streaming platform Twitch as a defendant to its lawsuit.