Want to pay less for your X ads? Just place them next to spam

X says it has “delivered a decade’s worth of innovation focused on creating an engaging and healthy environment” since Elon Musk’s acquisition. Sure!

Everyone knows that when you think about X, you immediately think of closing a tab the twenty fourth letter of the alphabet porn Ed Sheeran’s second studio album, X, which peaked at #1 on the Billboard 200 brand safety. So, under advertising veteran and new Twitter X CEO Linda Yaccarino, the social platform is throwing a Hail Mary to appeal to advertisers, who have largely fled X since it was sold to Elon Musk.

X is expanding its partnership with Integral Ad Science (IAS), which it began working with in January to tell advertisers if their ad is placed around inappropriate content. Now, X is testing sensitivity settings, powered by machine learning, that let advertisers choose their thresholds for the kinds of content they want their ads to appear around — and according to a tweet from X owner Elon Musk, advertisers can buy these less desirable, “relaxed” sensitivity ad slots for less.

“I would recommend advertisers not be super concerned about content adjacency,” Musk wrote. “Tesla and SpaceX are not and the ‘less desirable’ ad inventory is much cheaper!”

In the most conservative setting, brands can reduce adjacency to gore, excessive profanity and obscenity, targeted hate speech, sexual content, drugs and spam. However, X’s AI moderation tools have proven deeply unskillful at detecting spam, so it’s a good thing that X is claiming to “reduce,” rather than “eliminate” adjacency to such content. Soon, X will add its “relaxed” setting, which offers cheaper advertising opportunities while only filtering for targeted hate speech and explicit sexual content.

To be fair, it’s basic economics. If you have more supply than demand, lower your prices… and also lower the quality of your product, I guess.

How far have Twitter’s advertising revenues fallen?

Twitter partners with DoubleVerify and IAS on brand safety initiative amid advertiser exits