With Elon Musk’s X platform facing a possible existential crisis in 2024 due to a significant decline in ad revenue, it’s worth taking a moment to consider why this element is so important, and how reliant platforms are on ad spend.

To provide some perspective, the team from Visual Capitalist recently put together this overview of exactly how some of the major online providers bring in their money, and how reliant each is on advertisers.

As you can see from the Meta overview, social platforms, in particular, are highly dependent on ad spend. The Meta visualization here is similar to X’s revenue split, and despite trying to augment this with subscription offerings, X hasn’t been able to shift the needle in any significant way as yet.

Which is why X’s pushback against advertisers is a major threat, and could become a much bigger problem in the next year.

You can check out Visual Capitalist’s full overview here.