In the last two weeks, eXTwitter has become increasingly desperate to show you ads. Here’s what Elon did—and how to avoid ads completely.
We know eXTwitter was losing money before Elon bought it in late 2022 and took it private. Forbes reports that usage of ExTwitter dropped 30% in 2023. And though we no longer have public information on profitability, eXTwitter’s revenue shows a continued decline. 
Presumably, Elon, the owner of the growing dumpster fire that is eXTwitter, has noticed that he’s losing a lot of money. So he’s attempting to grow revenue by selling more advertising, eXTwitter’s dominant revenue stream.
Two ways to convince potential advertisers that it’s worth advertising on eXTwitter are to:
- show ads in more places; and
- make it harder to suppress them.
And that’s what Elon has done in the last two weeks.
How advertising on eXTwitter became so bad
A quick history.
Although Twitter started showing the occasional “Promoted Tweet” in 2010, it wasn’t until around 2014 that ads became a regular feature of a user’s timeline. (Twitter didn’t even show ads to people who weren’t signed in until December 2015.) Twitter kept advertising tolerable by showing mainly quality ads from well-known brands.
After Elon’s purchase in October 2022, he made a series of decisions that alienated many mainstream advertisers. And recently, his endorsement of an antisemitic conspiracy theory and eXTwitter’s placement of ads alongside white nationalist and pro-Nazi content has caused more blue-chip advertisers to suspend advertising on the platform.
Today, a glance through your eXTwitter timeline bombards you with low-quality ads from companies you’ve never heard of.
Here are the two ways they’ve recently got worse.
1—eXTwitter now includes ads in searches
Until a couple of weeks ago, eXTwitter searches did not include ads.
Now searches include ads.
Annoying!
2—eXTwitter adds another step to blocking advertisers
One way—probably ineffectual but somewhat satisfying—to send a signal to advertisers that perhaps they’re wasting their money, is to block them.
Here’s how that used to work:
Well, a couple of weeks ago, Elon decided to make this process more time-consuming. Here’s what you have to do now:
Notice the extra step? eXTwitter has added this additional modal dialog into the steps to block an account:
Every time.
No, Elon, I don’t want the option to upgrade to Premium+ every time I block an advertiser.
Incidentally, for a few days, muting the advertiser avoided having to click through this new pop-up. Now it’s there for muting too.
Avoid eXTwitter ads altogether
For most of Twitter’s existence, I never saw a single ad. That’s because I used TweetDeck, “a series of customizable columns, which can be set up to display the user’s Twitter timeline, mentions, direct messages, lists, trends, favorites, search results, hashtags, or all tweets by or to a single user.” TweetDeck was free until July 2023, when Elon restricted it to Premium (paid) users.
As far as I know, there’s no way to avoid ads on eXTwitter’s mobile apps. But you can easily avoid them on some browser-based platforms—I recommend Firefox—by using an ad blocker, such as UBlock Origin (free, recommended) or Total Adblock (expensive).
[Tip: In July 2024, Google is introducing a new Chrome browser architecture that will severely limit the effectiveness of ad blockers like UBlock Origin. That’s why I recommend people switch to Firefox, which will continue to allow ad blockers to work.]
Final note: On Wednesday, March 6, Manchild Elon said X may stop showing the number of likes and reposts people get. Yes, that’ll help eXTwitter’s popularity a lot.
Graph of Twitter revenue attribution: Business of Apps