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.

  • @[email protected]
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    42 years ago

    Well no kidding, Elon Musk bought twitter to delete it. He just has to do it in the realistic way.

  • @[email protected]
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    632 years ago

    What the fuck are “unregretted user minutes”? I regret every minute any user spends on that site, so it should be zero.

    • ZeroCoolOP
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      2 years ago

      LMAO Elon is never going to notice you no matter how valiantly you defend his honor on the internet or how upset you get on his behalf.

  • @[email protected]
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    92 years ago

    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.

  • Tygr
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    22 years ago

    Elon, cannot in fact, run Twitter better.

  • @[email protected]
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    342 years ago

    I’m sure the users will come back once Must starts charging a monthly fee for using TwitteX.

  • @[email protected]
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    142 years ago

    You mean welcoming pedo-nazis to leave harassing messages on every single post they interact with drives people away? Shock! Intrigue!

  • Obinice
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    412 years ago

    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.

  • @[email protected]
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    182 years ago

    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.

    • @[email protected]
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      32 years ago

      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.

  • @[email protected]
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    212 years ago

    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…

    • Em Adespoton
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      152 years ago

      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.

        • Em Adespoton
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          172 years ago

          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.

          • @[email protected]
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            2 years ago

            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.

  • @[email protected]
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    262 years ago

    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.

    • @[email protected]
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      92 years ago

      I kinda doubt this. What’s more likely is that she knew it was 225 and ±25 to be more vague.

        • @[email protected]
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          12 years ago

          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.