After announcing that hashtags would be banned from all Promoted Posts on X last week, X owner Elon Musk also flagged another coming to change to X’s ad process, with bigger ads to soon cost more per placement.
Which, like the decision on hashtags, relates to aesthetics, and ensuring that the X feed looks neat and clean.
As explained by Musk:
“X is moving to charging for ads based on vertical size, so an ad that takes up the whole screen would cost more than an ad that takes up 1/4 of the screen, otherwise the incentive is to create giant ads that impair the user experience.”
To be clear, X hasn’t enacted this update as yet, and there’s nothing mentioned about the change in X’s ad pricing overview at this stage. But the change is coming, which is another consideration for your X campaigns.
So why the update?
Well, as Musk notes, right now, advertisers are able to take up more screen space with bigger images and videos in their ads, which wins them greater screen presence.
As you can see in these examples of X’s text, image and video ads, each can vary in size, depending on the length of the attachment you include in your promotion.
Here’s another comparison of varying X ad size (on desktop):
You can also see how Community Notes alerts extend this even further, taking up more feed space.
There are limits on this, as the text element gets cut off after 180 characters (hidden by a “show more” tag beyond that), and there are size restrictions for images and videos. But you can see how the variation can lead to differing ad experiences.
And clearly, Elon’s not happy with some of the longer ads he’s seeing.
So does this make logical sense, or is it a cash-grab by X, which is still struggling to make money?
Maybe both?
It does make some sense to charge based on ad size, which other platforms do already, and given the variance based on your visual attachments, there could be a significant difference in this respect.
And yes, that will also enable X to make more money, though really, this depends on how much more X is planning to actually charge brands to get these bigger ads, which could have a significant impact on your platform planning.
If Elon ups the price by a lot, you can bet that many X ads will suddenly shrink in response, as ad partners look to see if they can get the same response from less spend. But if the variance is little, then maybe there’s no difference, and it won’t be a big consideration for your promotions.
We don’t know what the new pricing structure will be, nor how it will be communicated to advertisers, but it is coming, and will be another factor to take note of in your planning.
