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.
Elon Musk could not wake up tomorrow and the world would be much better off.
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We could even use the same photos of the bomb from Die Hard to convince the public that they have WMDs!
Ugh, now I have to stop using that phrase
40 upvotes, 0 downvotes on my instance: Wishing death for neurodivergent people is cool!
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?
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.
Government, corporate, and celebrities haven’t budged. That’s the problem. I left about 2 weeks after the blue checks started getting pushed to the top of comments. Those blue-checklefucks are trash.
It’s not that easy to break an addiction, but I have faith that Musk can fuck this website up juuuuust enough to chase away a higher percentage.
Surprising really, people are STILL sticking around
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.
My friend, I’ll take your first point in good faith. It is in the right it’ll take a long time to fall apart. True. Thank you, I’m cheered up. I will kindly offer the following for the rest of your comment, as honest freindly help. You present a false analogy fallacy, we’re talking passenger losses, not stations. Then you segue into a slippy slope fallacy. I mean, it’s a nice comment and all, but factually 97% count on users or 103% is just noise it the data. We cannot conclude much at all from it and that’s why it’s factually and honestly, disappointing. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Most people probably don’t subscribe to news feeds that you or I might. They probably only see a blurb about anti-semitism and such going up.
I subscribe to a bunch of tech news and nerd blogs. I see multiple reports of each major change, with multiple takes, and multiple examples. My awareness of the problems is a lot higher than I expect the average user and I never even used the service.
It’s useful to remember that people who bother moving to an alternative that is less prominent and harder to engage are already quite different from the average. Those who signed up for BlueSky got invites to an alternative, so that doesn’t count. They did it to have a seat at the next potential big thing. Lemmy and Mastadon do not strike me as potential-next-big-things.
ETA: stream of consciousness, just woke up.
Yeah, I imagine that this concentrated the cesspool even more, increased concentration of extremism, whether political or religious, just by removing moderates. I was going to use the term liberals with a small “l” because that’s what the damn word means, but went with inventing a new noun to be clear.
Not everyone wants to come to niche communities where none of their friends are. Normal people just ignore Musk and interact with their friends. Something you Lemmy users don’t seem to know how to do.
I only ever interacted with strangers on ShXitter. I guess that means you’re right. Hello stranger 👋
I don’t trust the numbers anyway. And although Musk pretended to be angry about bots inflating the user stats to try to get out of buying the company after the gag got real, he hasn’t exactly discouraged bots from inflating the numbers now.
~10% is absolutely nothing in the big picture. I’m much more interested in seeing who stays around when the platform starts charging a subscription
I’m going to pretend I’m surprised.
Seriously though, what was the rational for the name change
What is the rational for anything since the muskrat moved in.
Sunk cost fallacy. Musk has wanted to create an “internet bank” named “X” since working on PayPal. His partners never let him name it “X” (probably because it’s an objectively bad name) so ever since then he has wanted to make “X” a reality.
I think he was planning on quickly rolling crypto out to every account to make some weird monetization scheme where he doesn’t actually have to pay anyone, but then by the time the purchase was finalized the crypto market went bust and a lot of people have lost interest.
I still think he has plans to do weird stuff with monetization (based off previous remarks he has made), but we will see if it ever ends up implemented.
Musk has moved on from trying to create an ‘internet bank’. Dude now wants to make something like LINE or WeChat, which is absolutely hilarious.
I jumped over to Mastodon back in November, dual wielded for a couple of months until Tweetbot got shut down, then went 100% Mastodon. But every now and then I’ll log back in to Twitter and lurk to see what my old follows are up to.
And it’s kinda sad, seeing them mostly just dunking on Musk and his ‘policies’, rather than just fucking it off altogether. Back in February I was missing following the people I’d been interacting with for over ten years, but now I don’t think I’d follow some of them even if they came over.
Haven’t logged in for a few weeks now. I don’t really see the point any more.
I live in a country where reporters are kidnapped, jailed or getting account hacked since all GSM operators gave “root access” to the Strongman 's script kiddies.
While reporters barely “eat” they were even forced to buy blue ticks because of new algorithm. Why? Because the general public didn’t give up the platform.
Musk recently had a closed meeting with the Strongman even bringing his baby and promised some Tesla shit. His SpaceX also carry satellite missions of the regime.
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.
Calling it “x” is a thoroughbred-mouthbreather move.
I’m calling it X. That site doesn’t deserve to be called Twitter anymore. Let them lose the recognizable brand and cling onto a random letter that makes searches and discussions about it much harder.
Musk wanted a swastika, but the PR department said hard no. After firing half the department, they still said no and proposed using X instead as it’s close enough. Musk had been pretending it was his idea since then.
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?
Looking at his recent posts it looks like he didn’t buy it to make money but to increase his influence. Just recently he promoted a post that calls to vote for the farright party in Germany for example.
Oh I don’t know… twitter was probably seen as good tool for more pump & dump and other financial scams, not to mention the opportunity to influence worldwide politics.
Then there’s the wish to turn it into an everything app with micro transactions at every step of the way. Such a beast wouldn’t get far in the EU, and probably not the US either.
There was no catalyst specifically but I deleted my shortcuts and uninstalled the app a couple of weeks ago because there just isn’t anything for me on Twitter, X or whatever. Have not gone back since.
It suprises me that people still use Twitter. Like, how spineless are you?
Can’t speak for other people, but I use Twitter and Reddit for different reasons. I use Reddit for communities I have an interest in, so when the move to Lemmy/kbin started, it wasn’t that hard for me to migrate over. For Twitter though, I use it to follow specific people and/or company news, so unless they decide to migrate to Mastodon or other platforms, Twitter will still be a site I visit.
Nah man, I prefer following people outside of Twitter/Mastodon. But mostly they call the police.
So far no one has given me compelling reason to leave.
Why do you care anyways? I can’t figure out why anyone would use something like Facebook or TikTok either, but they do and I’m not going around calling them spineless. Not everyone needs to like/not like the things I do.
Why do you care anyways?
Because I want enshittified platforms to fail so this horrible “trend” can stop and companies actually start focusing again on “how to make a better site” instead of “how to make the site that will make us the most money”
This is a good example of what I mean, when I said that no one has given me a compelling reason. Not everyone needs to like/not like things you do. I’d like other people to do things that would benefit my desires aswell, but I don’t go around demanding that. Twitter is no shittier today, than it was the day I joined. From my perspective, nothing has changed, so I have no more reason to leave than I had reason to join in the first place.
I don’t use any of them but I understand someone wanting to use FB way more than twitter lol, twitter has always been the most useless to me. Im not sure I can really think of anything it does something else doesnt do better.
I don’t know any other site with such large community of adult content creators. Reddit may be close.
Content creators? Bro they are tweets.
Reddit is mostly 14 year olds and toxic chronic Internet dwellers who somehow also are the most normie person ever.
Honestly all social media is shit. Even lemmy.
Content creators? Bro they are tweets.
What? Because I choose to share my pictures on twitter, I don’t count as a content creator?
I wouldn’t be surprised if she’d just pulled that 225M out of her ass to not look completely clueless, as it’s right in the middle of the ballpark 200-250M she mumbled about earlier.
I kinda doubt this. What’s more likely is that she knew it was 225 and ±25 to be more vague.
Don’t know if more likely but yeah, it’s a possibility, too.
It would just be such a weird thing to lie about, and then not even pick the largest option. She undoubtedly knows the previous number, she could have just repeated that instead of making one up.
I wonder why…
Good.
Good, one step closer to shutting it down.
