When Twitter began to unravel under new ownership in late 2022, Black users were among the first to look for the exits. Changes to content moderation and enforcement rattled communities that had long treated “Black Twitter” as a cultural home. Brands were rattled, too. The changes at Twitter left advertisers asking whether the platform remained brand-safe.
Out of that moment came Spill, a Black‑founded social app that positioned itself as an alternative for the users who felt most exposed to harassment and hate speech on mainstream platforms like Twitter. Now, nearly three years in, Spill is also trying to be a test case for what a culture‑first, brand‑safe ad model might look like for Black and multicultural audiences.
Instead of optimizing for raw reach, Spill is trying to build a business around trust, safety and tight-knit fandoms. The company has bundled revenue, trust and safety, community and creator programs under one leader. They also built their own AI moderation system and designed ad products that lean heavily on live, community‑driven conversations. It is a very different proposition from the automated ad stacks that dominate social media.
As the platform grows, it begs the question: Is there room in global media plans for a smaller, high‑touch platform like this? And can advertisers treat relevance and cultural fit as primary metrics, rather than scale?
According to Spill’s chief growth officer, Kenya Parham, the company projected it would cross $1 million in annualized revenue at the start of 2025 and had surpassed that mark by the end of the third quarter of 2025.
Structuring Revenue and Safety on the Same Team
Spill’s monetization strategy starts with an organizational choice that runs against the grain of most large social platforms. Revenue, trust and safety, community, creators and partnerships all roll up to Parham, under what the company calls its “life cycle” team.
On bigger networks, those functions are often split. Sales teams push for more inventory and new formats while policy and safety teams try to limit harm and manage risk. Creators and community groups sit somewhere in the middle. Parham argues that separation creates the conditions for constant internal conflict.
“If the person building your revenue model doesn’t understand what makes the community feel safe, you’re always going to have tension,” Parham said.
Spill is betting that putting one leader in charge of both growth and safety will force those trade‑offs into the same conversation. In theory, the team that designs ad products also has to live with their impact on user trust, moderation workload and creator sentiment.
Inside a High‑Touch Buy: Gilead on Spill
Spill’s approach matters only if marketers can translate it into campaigns that meet their objectives. One of the clearest examples so far is its work with Gilead Sciences, a biopharmaceutical company that develops and commercializes medicine.
The pharmaceutical company partnered with Spill to change how Black and Brown communities talk about sexual health and pre‑exposure prophylaxis (PrEP). The goal is to move the conversation beyond narrow associations and to include, for instance, cisgender Black women, who are often left out of HIV prevention messaging.
On Spill, that partnership involved a mix of live and static elements. Gilead had sponsored “Tea Parties,” Spill’s go‑live format that combines video, audio and chat, in which creators and health experts host open discussions about users’ attitudes toward PrEP and sexual health more generally. Spill used in‑feed creative to promote those conversations and drive attendance, rather than simply pushing stand‑alone campaign messages. And Gilead supported Spill’s presence at offline events where the app’s community gathers, extending the conversation beyond the screen.
Parham characterizes this as “spending to listen” as much as spending to tell. By underwriting real conversations in a community that already talks this way, she argued, Gilead can gather insight into how people think and feel, which voices carry weight and which messages resonate.
The partnership has expanded into multiple lines of business with Gilead and has prompted interest from other pharmaceutical companies, she said.
Brand Safety for Black and Multicultural Audiences
The Gilead campaign is a reflection of how the social platform ties its social and cultural efforts to its revenue. Spill’s brand safety efforts are a core foundation for tying culture with revenue. Spill presents itself as a home for Black, Brown, queer and other marginalized users who have often borne the brunt of abuse elsewhere.
The company’s community guidelines, which Parham helped author, are written with explicit attention to how its users speak, interact and are treated, and the guidelines are treated as a living document. When language, memes or cultural references evolve, the Spill adjusts the guidelines.
On top of that, Spill has built its own AI moderation system and has been training an underlying language model on those guidelines and on platform behavior since launch. The goal, according to Parham, is to make the AI “culturally competent” enough to detect nuance and coded language that generic systems might miss. A human trust‑and‑safety team, composed of people from the same communities, reviews edge cases and adds context. Users are encouraged to report violations and, over time, to normalize the platform’s rules.
There is 66% less harassment on Spill compared to legacy social platforms, Parham said
Spill has become a safe place to have tricky conversations about race and other sensitive topics. But it’s those conversations that are often misclassified as risky by advanced brand‑safety tools and suitability filters. Black vernacular, LGBTQ+ topics or frank discussions of racism can all trigger blocks, even when the content is informational rather than harmful.
“Brand safety has often been less about actual safety and more about comfort,” Parham said, arguing that the language of safety has sometimes been used to justify excluding Black experiences from ad spend.
Spill’s answer is not to sanitize the feed but to offer a more predictable environment for brands that need to be in those conversations. Spill is targeting marketers who are trying to reach Black and multicultural audiences but are wary of adjacency on the biggest platforms.
