X · microblogging

How much does X (Twitter) earn from your data?

X is the collection's outlier: the one entry that repriced downward. Analyst estimates put 2025 global ad revenue near $2.26 billion, roughly half what Twitter earned in 2021, with about $1.31 billion from ~56 million US users ≈ $23 each.

How X turns you into revenue

The ad business still works the classic way (interests inferred from follows, posts and engagement, sold to advertisers); it just clears at lower prices since 2022's ownership change and the advertiser pullback that followed. eMarketer's 2025 estimates show the first year-over-year growth in four years, but from a floor: your figure here is worth a fraction of its 2021 peak.

The newer trade is data, not ads: X's posts feed Grok, xAI's model family, and API access is priced for data buyers. Like Reddit, X has found that a decade of your public posts has a second market as training corpus — the difference is that X's terms opt you into it by default, with the toggle buried in settings.

What the price is built on

• Follows, posts, reposts and likes — the interest graph.
• Engagement and dwell behavior on the timeline.
• Your public post archive — Grok training inventory.
• Device and location signals for ad geo-targeting.

Turn it down

X ads preferences ↗ limits ad personalization; the separate "Grok & Third-party Collaborators" setting controls whether your posts train xAI models — it is on by default and worth checking. The full ranked plan is on the take-it-back page.

Sources: eMarketer X ad-revenue estimates 2025; public reporting on X data licensing and Grok training defaults. X is private — all figures are estimates. Working on the methodology page. Figures as of August 2026.