- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
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.
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What’s twitter? I thought they renamed it to “Sex”?
Still located at twitter.com.
Shitter
Can confirm, use it while shitting
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’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.
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.
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.
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 👋
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)_/¯
Surprising really, people are STILL sticking around
my account is from 2008 i deleted it today when i saw the digusting shit elon has been posting and that is boosted on there.
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.
For those unfamiliar with website/app analytics: a hugely successful, modern advanced analytics campaign (say AI or Machine Learning based) might move the needle on a a key KPI for a huge business like Twitter to the tune of say 3%-5%.
Over 11% would be huge numbers for a highly advanced, highly focused team to achieve in terms of measurable impact on a higher platform like that.
This moral imperative humping dolt achieved that number in negative effects to his company without even trying.
Without even trying?
What are you talking about, he re-routed his jet after his associate suggested ripping servers out themselves. Then personally crawled underneath and started unplugging them. Then hired a team of undocumented workers to move them overnight, to save a few bucks.
This idiotic move directly lead to huge outtages and the entire snafu of Ron DeSantis Twitter Spaces presidential announcement.
That sounds like a lot of effort, he is definitely trying… lol
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That’s pretty huge when the earth adds about 1% to the population, year over year. One would expect it to increase, any decrease of active users is really bad for a social platform.
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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.
Twitter has had nothing but rage bait and engagement bots for a while now and the tweets are so obviously fake that even the general public is slowly starting to catch on. It’s such a cesspool that you would be hard-pressed to find anything remotely entertaining or informative. Instead you will just leave the site with a feeling of disgust and frustration.
What the fuck are “unregretted user minutes”? I regret every minute any user spends on that site, so it should be zero.
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since it’s elon, i wouldn’t be surprised if it was how much time people spend reading his tweets
This feels tantalizingly close to the truth.
Did you guys know companies that are dying often get appointed female CEOs, the only one that turned it around is probably Sue Bae from AMD.
Which ass did you pull that out of ?
maybe be nicer to each other? I hoped Lemmy would be a bit more open.
The phenomenon has a Wikipedia page… whether it exists, who knows, but you can read more there: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_cliff
Yeah, my bad. It just sounded so ridiculous and without a source that I overreacted.
Sorry @[email protected] .
P.S Thanks for the link @[email protected] . Who knows whether the phenomenon does exist…
You should also apologize my ass, which is a very credible source of information.
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.
~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
Considering it’s a Fascist platform now, it would be alarming if it weren’t losing users.
Especially given that it used to have billions of users, back when it wasn’t Fascist.
I never used Twitter actively but used it for announcements and live events happening. Now when I go to a page for updates it shows me (maybe?) the most active tweets from the past. For example, I’ll check the MLS page for game delays, the MLS page will have the post of a delay on their site, but if I go to the MLS Twitter it just shows posts from years ago about some goal that is so irrelevant for what I am looking for. I could list many other examples of how useless it has become…
Indeed. I used Twitter to get on-the-ground reporting for incidents important to me. Since they moved to requiring being signed in to search hashtags, I’ve switched to other, less timely sources instead. It’s a shame, because you can’t use X for what Twitter was originally designed to provide.
What are you using now?
A combination of Lemmy, Mastodon, Google News and focused news blogs (by geography or topic).
I should probably go back to using an RSS reader like I did before Twitter.
Google News has really dropped in quality over the past few phones I’ve used it on. The kind of shit they put in my feed just keeps coming back after specifically telling it I want to see fewer things like this. That “feature” is a complete failure, and probably just a Close Door button in an elevator.
I’d stick to the AP News and Reuters apps but they’re both broken in different ways.
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?
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.
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.
That was the one bonus to him. He bought it because he made a stupid 420 joke that had legal ramifications (and not for the first time). He tried to back out of buying it but it was too late.
I thought it was just a way to sell a shitload of Tesla shares while the market was high, without it making it look like he wanted to sell TSLA. But then he got caught by the tail, and now he is just making what he thinks is best out of the situation. When life gives you Twitter, make it X? Idk.
