Elon Musk’s Rebranded Twitter Cuts Ad Prices

X Corp. is cutting ad prices as it tries to woo brands back to the Elon Musk -owned platform.

The social network formerly known as Twitter is offering new incentives on certain ad formats in the U.S. and U.K. and warning brands that they will lose their verified status unless they reach certain spending thresholds, emails sent this week to advertisers and viewed by The Wall Street Journal show.

The company, which makes most of its money from advertising, has struggled to draw new ad commitments under Musk’s ownership in part because brands are concerned about Musk’s approach to management and content moderation. The advertising industry is also in a slump, and several media companies have begun offering brands discounts.

X this week began offering some advertisers reduced pricing on video ads that run alongside a list of trending topics in X’s “Explore” tab, according to emails viewed by the Journal. Such ads give brands 24-hour placement atop the site’s list of trending topics.

It is offering 50% off any new bookings of those ads until July 31, among other discounts. “The goal of these discounts is to help our advertisers gain reach during crucial moments on Twitter such as the Women’s World Cup,” one of the emails read.

X also warned advertisers that beginning Aug. 7, brands’ accounts will lose their verification—a gold check mark that indicates their account truly represents their brand—if they haven’t spent at least $1,000 on ads in the previous 30 days or $6,000 on ads in the previous 180 days, according to the email.

Verification on the social media platform is important to many companies because they fear bad actors could impersonate and misrepresent their brand as some Twitter users did in the early weeks of Musk’s ownership. In one notorious example, an account posed as Eli Lilly and tweeted that the company would make insulin free. Twitter subsequently said it improved safeguards against impersonation.

Musk tweeted earlier this month that the company had seen a “~50% drop in advertising revenue” and had negative cash flow. He recently hired Linda Yaccarino, NBCUniversal’s former head of advertising, as the company’s chief executive to help bring brands back.

Musk has said the company could be cash-flow positive soon. Twitter suffered years of losses before Musk’s takeover and took on billions in debt as part of Musk’s acquisition.

This isn’t the first time the platform has tried to bolster its revenue by offering ad discounts. The company offered big ad incentives around the Super Bowl, typically Twitter’s biggest ad-revenue generator, the Journal reported earlier this year.

While some brands such as Mondelez International have returned to spending on the platform, the Journal previously reported, many brands have remained on the sidelines, according to ad buyers.

Doug Rozen, CEO of Dentsu Media, Americas, said last month at a Journal event during the Cannes Lions ad festival that the agency’s spending on Twitter was down about 70%.

Some ad buyers are hopeful that Yaccarino will bring much needed stability to the platform because she understands the importance of content moderation for advertisers. Yaccarino “is a known quantity in terms of understanding brands,” said Christina Hanson, CEO of ad-buying agency OMD USA during the Journal event.

Some advertisers say working with Twitter has been fraught at times. On July 1, the company limited how many posts users could read on Twitter, an effort Musk said was designed to block other companies from scraping the platform for data. The company said the change was temporary and eased the limits soon after enacting them.

The move quickly rippled into the advertising industry: Limiting tweet visibility meant fewer users saw ads, and ad prices rose. One agency saw its ad prices jump almost 15% during the change, according to an ad buyer.

Another ad buyer said it saw a decrease in engagement with its ads. The company said a few days later that the effects on advertising were minimal.

—Alexa Corse contributed to this article.

Write to Suzanne Vranica at [email protected] and Patience Haggin at [email protected]