Now, without further ado, somebody who needs no introduction. For many years, this was the queen of the advertising community, and now she's become the queen of big tech. Please give a big round of applause to ex-CEO Linda Yaccarino.
My pleasure, Linda. You are so busy, so we are very grateful for your time today. I didn't know we were kicking off the whole thing. Very exciting. Hi everybody. Kicking off the whole thing. Hi. Seeing all of our friends.
Linda, you cannot talk about live entertainment without talking about X. Everything live happens first on X. It's captured first on X. And one of the things that made me the most excited about talking to you was I'm a huge New York Jets fan, which is devastating. I know. Oh my goodness. We share the same miserable life. Matthew Hiltick, too. It's just really difficult.
But I noticed this year that you all had built an NFL portal. And so my question to you was, to what extent should we be expecting X to start building out more of these sort of entertainment hubs? Is that something we should expect now moving forward for the MLB, for the entertainment award shows? What's the plan?
Well, first of all, thank you for having me. It's nice to see everybody. And also thank you for talking about the actual secret sauce of the power of X, and that's where the real-time conversation happens only, right? So you have the conversation back and forth, and that's super important, and that's why fandom lives on the platform, right?
So if you think about the power of sports, even here at Cannes, I was thinking about it yesterday driving up and down La Croisette, and sports is just an overwhelming theme because of the global popularity and familiarity. And sports and X are intertwined, right? So in 2024, there were nearly 4 trillion impressions about sports on X. 4 trillion. And it's not just any impressions, it's lean-in impressions. We know how passionate we all are.
Frustrated sometimes like the Jets, but we are all passionate about our teams that live here, right? So the fandom and the heart of sports is intertwined and actually inextricably linked on X. It's why when we think about our tremendous partnerships that we have with leagues like the NFL and the NBA, that when we wanted to create and launch our portals—which think about it as the singular place to aggregate global conversation—every league, every team, every athlete, every publisher, every piece of video, all contributing to these portals. That's why they were so successful.
And we actually soft-launched it last year at this time with the Paris Olympics. So obviously it would be logical to imagine that the pipeline of what's to come to aggregate this fandom across the world will continue, and it's a great opportunity. Obviously, it's a deep, deep opportunity, very fulfilling and personalized for the fan, but then for our advertising partners, they come and follow.
Because when you think about it, when I told you all the people that are participating—every network, every streamer, every publisher—all contributing the content. Because when you participate or when your fan lives on X, the sports is 80% incremental reach to your TV or streaming content. So if you can take the limited nature—it's still big on the broadcast and streaming—and add 80% incremental reach to that experience, you've got a really happy fan and you have just as happy advertisers. So it's really great.
Let's talk about the advertiser opportunities. So obviously you have premier advertising partnerships through Amplify, and that's basically where premium publishers and leagues can come in and they can essentially ensure that they can team with premium advertisers around this type of content. What else is the advertiser opportunity that you are out here pitching to folks around live?
Oh my goodness, there's so much. I think you ask a really good question though, because there's no other platform that can capitalize on live. And what I mean by that, by bringing together in real time the person who's consuming any of that content and be able to participate, is X, right? We know that, no argument there.
So because of the impact and the leadership position we've taken with AI, with the company and driving innovation, we have a new product that's been out in the marketplace called Trend Genius. So think about the question you asked—the power of live—and Trend Genius capitalizes on that. It takes advantage of the real-time conversation that was never able to be done before.
So X is known for its trends, what's happening. If you think about it, X is both a mirror and a microphone of global conversation in real time. So when a trend kicks in on the platform, what happens? We have a product, an ad product with pre-negotiated KPIs or parameters or environments, right? Completely protected and safe, and there's subject matter that kicks in a trend that meets all of those.
The content starts trending on the platform, and the advertisement that meets those requirements gets automatically infused into the timeline. The timeline's live, right? So I'll give you a good example to visualize. So a couple of months ago, I think it was about six months ago, Bradley Cooper was spotted at a Taylor Swift concert with Travis Kelce in a box. You can't create a better trend moment, right?
So all of a sudden on the platform—which by the way, a data point for everyone to know—Bradley Cooper on average gets one post a second globally on the platform outside of this situation. That's a big responsibility. So people started trending. They started trending: 'Bradley Cooper's a Swifty. Bradley Cooper's a Swifty.' Well, we have a really strong relationship with LVMH. Bradley Cooper is an influencer for LVMH.
And immediately when that trend reached the threshold, the Bradley Cooper copy or ad got infused and incorporated right into the timeline while the trend was raging. So your content of your advertisement actually becomes the content because it's so natural, organic, and part of the public discourse at such high trends.
The great thing about Trend Genius is you ride the wave, and then when it starts to hit the floor—that's pre-negotiated—and the trend cools down, the campaign pauses. Maximum ROI, maximum contextual impact, no fat in your plan. It actually is, I call it the holy grail of advertising, right? The best ad product I've ever seen because it's right ad, right time, right place at scale.
When we think about X's relationship with advertisers, you have these incredible products that you're going to market with. But there's also chatter around just broadly how you're managing the relationship with advertisers. There was a Wall Street Journal story out recently that basically alleged that one of the things that you and Elon Musk were doing was sort of pressuring advertisers.
The headline of that story was 'X's Sales Pitch: Give Us Your Ad Business or We'll Sue.' It cited six advertisers that have felt this pressure from you. Is that story true?
Does anyone still read that publication? I do, because I saw at the beach they were giving it away for free this morning, so that probably says something. Listen, it's really—having a paper like that cover X is like taking a horse and buggy to cover a rocket ship.
So what I would say is let's concentrate on the facts of the story. And the facts that were painfully absent were that this started out by evidence that was revealed by the House Judiciary Committee. Forgot about that part, right? And the House Judiciary Committee and the government continue to investigate into an even broader probe about an organized boycott.
Maybe the editor, I don't know, lost that in the reporting. And what was also surprising to me and really disappointing was that there were no named sources and there were some random third parties that commented. And what is really interesting to me is—is that where journalism has us today?
So what I would say is that what we're here to talk about today, and probably what fuels this type of salacious clickbait article, is the historic turnaround of X. And I mean historic because many predicted that we wouldn't be in the position that we are today, right? Strong growth quarter after quarter after quarter, 300 products shipped since the original acquisition, now merged with the fastest-growing, smartest AI company on earth, with having Grok power the timeline, influencing content recommendation, content moderation, and search. So that is something exciting to talk about.
I want to talk about that for sure, but just to make sure I'm hearing you loud and clear: the article then is not true?
Listen, I'm not one of those reporters who wrote that article with unnamed sources. You should probably have them up here to talk about how that was considered a complete article, but you know, we're used to it.
When it comes to that type of relationship, I do think there is this weird tension between managing the relationship with advertisers in a new—
Sarah, I just told you that the company is experiencing a third consecutive quarter of historic revenue growth, the historic turnaround of the company. So, folks like that—if you look at the trajectory of where that particular publication is going, you know, the future is quite unnerving. They're probably worried about what's next for themselves.
Well, I was going to say you have this one side where you have the advertiser relationships reported there. Then you have this other side where you're hearing, you're talking about innovation. What is the innovation that is resonating the most right now? We talked about the new live product. Is it Grok? Is that what advertisers right now are really excited to hear about? Is it video?
First of all, they're excited about a lot of things. So you think about—I just hit my two-year anniversary at the company, and when I started at the company, I only ever talked to Elon about one thing, and that was transitioning Twitter to become X, the everything app. And for the last two years, as I said a few minutes ago, we've launched 300 new products, both user enhancements and brand enhancements.
So when I first started, there was maybe a minute or two of video capability, and back then I think it used to be a 140-character messaging app, then it became 280 at acquisition. And now think about all the investment in video—up to 4 hours, 4 hours in 4K you can post to the platform imminently. Literally imminently, could happen during this talk. It's going to be unlimited video.
In the US, we're about to launch X Money. You've seen the enhancements with X Chat for premium users—off-the-charts capability. So think about what we're doing. Instead of getting distracted by clickbait noise, you're thinking about more people coming to the platform to spend more time, to do more things. Soon you're going to be able to live your whole financial life on the platform: peer-to-peer payments, stored value, pay a creator, watch a pay-per-view.
I mean, come on. We're talking about what's next, not what stuff you talk about—a fantasy of the past. So I wouldn't be here spending a jam-packed five days if we didn't have tremendous partners along with us.
So I guess the question is, what's the thing that they—is it the video product? Because I know you're announcing a video podcast with the Williams sisters. Is it Grok? If we have marketers in the room right now, what are the big takeaways?
