X's $100 million a year 'Promoted Accounts' ad feature is no more

Are you still advertising on X, the Elon Musk-owned social media platform formerly known as Twitter? If so, you might have received an email about the company sunsetting one of its oldest advertising features: Promoted Accounts.As first reported by Axios on Tuesday, X’s advertising clients were informed via email that the Promoted Accounts feature, also known as “Follower Objective” ads, is being shut down. These ads are text-based content that appears in the timeline feed with a Follow button — they don’t directly promote any content, the call-to-action is to simply follow the user.This move from X is baffling when you consider that the ad format routinely generated more than $100 million per year in revenue for the platform, according to an Axios source who is familiar with X’s business. The report mentions that these types of ads were “easy to sell,” but didn’t factor into the platform’s plans for the future. With media such as videos being a focus for Musk, static-type ads like Promoted Accounts are being phased out. As of publishing time, advertisers can still run these ad types.For users, the loss of these ads probably won’t mean much. From personal experience as a power user of the platform, Promoted Accounts rarely matched my interests and often came off as spammy. However, they clearly seemed to be working for the company and at least some of its advertisers.However, the more interesting tidbit here is how the decision was made to remove an ad format that was creating…X's $100 million a year 'Promoted Accounts' ad feature is no more