YEREVAN (CoinChapter.com) — Advertising on X doesn’t deliver any results. This is the reason why, according to billionaire entrepreneur and Shark Tank investor Mark Cuban, companies are ditching the Elon Musk-led social media giant.
This is not the first time the Dallas Mavericks owner has criticized Musk. The two have clashed a few times on the platform before. But this time, Cuban decided to school the Tesla CEO with some hard facts.
Mark Cuban Finds Advertising On X to be Inefficient
In a recent post on X, Musk decided to lash out at NewsGuard, a tech firm that rates news sources and platforms on basic journalistic criteria of credibility and transparency. Its browser extension tool currently rates over 7,500 websites.
Complaining about the company’s upcoming report on X, Musk called them “a propaganda shop that will produce any lies you want if you pay them enough money.” He is apprehensive that the report will not be a favorable one for his firm.
His social media company had also posted a tweet criticizing the report, “on misinformation on X.”
NewsGuard has previously faced criticism for being a “censorship tool” backed by the Government to target websites.
But, given that the platform also tracks brand safety for advertisers, Cuban decided to weigh in.
Sharing Musk’s post, he highlighted how X has failed to deliver on ads.
“If advertisers were getting results from their X ads, or possibly if you posted data that showed that ads on this platform were effective and produced results, you would be in an entirely different position,”
Cuban said.
Asked whether he has used the platform to run an ad, he pointed out that many firms from his portfolio have. He has invested in many companies. All of them, “without exception,” allegedly agree that advertising on X delivers no results.
Cuban also pointed out how, compared to other platforms, he has received irrelevant ads about products he would never buy. This, according to him, shows that X isn’t a good place to promote a product.
Good News, Elon Musk!
Elon Musk has previously revealed that the social media giant’s revenues are falling. In July this year, he acknowledged that X had “negative cash flow” partly “due to ~50% drop in advertising revenue.”
In Sept. 2023, he also claimed several advertisers had ditched X, slashing a large portion of the firm’s revenues.
For this, he blamed the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). The US-based Jewish organization leads efforts aimed at combatting antisemitism.
In December 2022, ADL published a blog titled “Extremists, Far Right Figures Exploit Recent Changes to Twitter.” The report slammed Musk’s choice to sell the “verified” blue checkmark and offer “amnesty” to suspended Twitter accounts.
The organization flagged X as a platform that allows hate to thrive. Its campaign resonated with advertisers, who began deserting Musk’s company.
However, now Mark Cuban believes that ADL is not the main reason for X’s losses in advertisement revenue. According to him, the problem lies with the social media giant’s performance.
“If your ads produce results, businesses would tell you they understand how difficult it is to completely eliminate hate on the platform. If they don’t produce results, there is no reason for a big company to f**k around and find out that their ads showed up next to a hateful post,”
he wrote in the tweet.
While Elon Musk wants to find scapegoats for not delivering the vision he sold to investors, Cuban is busy giving him a reality check. Businesses always find a way to justify whatever earns them money. So, if X isn’t doing that, it tells us something.
The first step in solving a problem is realizing there is one. Will the world’s richest man wake up to smell the coffee?
