By now, you may have heard about Elon Musk’s handpicked CEO for X, Linda Yaccarino, and her disastrous interview with CNBC’s Julia Boorstin at Vox Media’s Code 2023 event. However, somewhat overlooked amid some of the more viral moments of the discussion, Yaccarino dropped some previously unknown stats that don’t exactly paint such a rosy picture for the company:
X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, is losing daily active users under the leadership of Elon Musk.
Speaking at Vox Media’s Code 2023 tech conference earlier this week, X CEO Linda Yaccarino shared that the company currently has 225 million daily active users – a decline in tens of millions or 11.6 percent of users from just before Musk acquired the company.
According to a series of tweets that Musk himself posted in November of last year, Twitter had 254.5 million daily active users the week before his takeover in late November of last year.
Following the conference, X revised its daily active user count to 245 million daily active users, according to The Information. Before specifically saying X had 225 million active users, Yaccarinno previously cited “200 to 250 million” daily active users earlier in the interview.
However, even X’s revised number of 245 million daily active users would still see X lose millions or around 3.7 percent of daily active users from before Musk’s acquisition.
In fact, daily active users are even down from the numbers that Musk shared last year when he was in charge. According to the aforementioned Musk tweet, Twitter had 259.4 million daily active users in mid-November 2022. Compared to the daily active users Twitter was pulling late last year under Musk’s leadership, X has shed nearly 15 million users – a drop of roughly 5.6 percent.
Twitter first started sharing this metric, which the company refers to as monetizable daily active users or mDAU, years before Musk even planned to buy the company. The reason? Twitter’s daily active user numbers were reliably more favorable for the company than its other metrics when it shared its quarterly reports for investors and shareholders.
When Yaccarino was first asked about user metrics during the interview, she seemingly wanted to move away from that particular conversation, saying that X had between 200 and 250 daily active users. She then moved the discussion to the platform’s Communities feature, the company’s answer to Facebook Groups, saying X had 50,000 communities and that engagement numbers and time spent in those communities were up since June.
Along with the daily active user metrics, Yaccarino also shared that X now has a record 550 million monthly active users. This would be up from the 541 million “monthly users” metric that Musk shared in a post in July.
It’s unclear, however, just how much of the monthly active user growth has happened under Musk when compared to how the company was doing prior to his takeover. That’s because in 2019, Twitter stopped reporting this number in favor of the daily active user metric. The company entered that year with 321 million monthly active users, the last publicly reported monthly active user metric directly from Twitter.
It should be noted that Musk has shifted away from both the daily and monthly active user numbers in favor of “unregretted user minutes,” a metric seemingly made-up by Musk.
That’s still stunningly more people still using it than they deserve. I guess it’s hard to create new social networks.
Isn’t this assuming “active daily users” equate to people? Wouldn’t it stand to reason that “active daily users” are simply bots Musk has allowed to proliferate throughout the platform?
Elon, cannot in fact, run Twitter better.
It’s honestly fucking hilarious how hard Musk has Trumped this company.
People are still going to call it twitter and tweeting because it’s usable in a sentence. Calling it “x” is a thoroughbred-mouthbreather move. For example:
“Twitter tweeted an announcement that it would add disclaimers to tweets with misleading and false information regarding voter fraud”
“X x’d an announcement that it would add disclaimers to x’s that american elections are rigged and Trump and Musk are totally not the swamp they complain about”
“Blaze your glory!”
At a certain point it’s not trolling, you’re just being a retard.
What I find most interesting, though, is that there were only 250 Million daily active users in the first place. Musk paid like 176 bucks per user. There’s no way he could’ve milked that much revenue out of the users in any reasonable time frame.
Sure, there’s weekly and monthly active users, but how many ads can you possibly show someone who spends 5 minutes per week on formerly-known-as-Twitter?
It suprises me that people still use Twitter. Like, how spineless are you?
Especially journalists. Why are you using a platform that is actively hostile to you?
Exposure. Present day journalism lives and dies by exposure. If you’re not willing to prostitute yourself for exposure, you have no chance
That’s very disappointing. So at least 90% of people are still on there, if not 95% or even 98% still there. That’s barely more than a rounding error. Fuck, that is disappointing.
It took 16 years to build the network to where it was, it’ll take a long time for it to fall apart. Think of it like a train network. Imagine if the NY subway lost 3% of its stations, and some riders who either went from or to that station stopped using the subway. People might say “oh, it’s no big deal, just 3%, it’s still super useful to have a subway.” But then those riders that stopped using it are no longer using the other stations on their trips, and it’s then 3% harder to justify every station on the network. So any station that was borderline not worth it before now becomes definitely not worth it, and those drop. So now it’s 6% lower, and so on until there’s no stations left.
You mean welcoming pedo-nazis to leave harassing messages on every single post they interact with drives people away? Shock! Intrigue!
