• by Colin Kirkland , July 1, 2025

Elon Musk announced last week that his social media company X will begin charging brands based on the size of their ad.

“X is moving to charging for ads based on vertical size,” Musk wrote on X. “So an ad that takes up the whole screen would cost more than an ad that takes up ¼ of the screen.”

“Otherwise the incentive is to create giant ads that impair the user experience,” Musk added, hinting at aesthetic incentives related to the X’s recent decision to ban hashtags from all Promoted Posts. 

Once the update launches, it has the chance to diminish the amount of full-screen promotions currently overtaking users’ feeds. This could influence a more seamless content flow, while also boosting ad revenue for the company, if brands agree to pay more for larger, more attention-grabbing ads. 

Current limits exist for ad size, including a total of 180 characters for text promotions, as well as size restrictions for image and video ads. 

As of now, no pricing details have been mentioned by Musk or integrated into X’s ad pricing overview, so it is difficult to tell how much this will impact advertisers’ budgets when launching promotions on X.