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 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)_/¯
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 👋
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.