Twitter One Year Under Musk: Users Crash 16%, Downloads Down 38%, Ad Revenue Craters
Hannibal Hanschke/Pool via AP
One year after Elon Musk purchased X, formerly Twitter, the social media site has seen user engagement crash and advertisement revenue crater, according to new reports and analyses.
Under the leadership of Musk, the platform has instituted major changes, including laying off the vast majority of staff, dismantling mechanisms previously used to stop the spread of misinformation, installing pay-for-verification and renaming the company entirely.
Now, the new company X is struggling to attract users and rebuild its advertising partnerships, according to reports from the Wall Street Journal and Axios. The revenue plunge after Musk’s takeover is still holding the company back as well as declining mobile user engagement.
The Journal reported that daily active users on the X mobile application fell 16% from October 2022 to 2023.
Per the Journal, downloads have also fallen under Musk:
More recently, downloads dropped after Musk suddenly renamed the platform to X in July. People searching for “Twitter” didn’t necessarily know the app was now called X, said Tom Grant, vice president of research at Apptopia.
X says it has momentum, reporting this month its own data that show 1.5 million people sign up for X every day, up 4% from last year.
In other key metrics, from October 2022 to September 2023, Twitter’s mobile app download fell by 38% globally, according to Axios. In addition, U.S. mobile app downloads also plunged by 57% during the same period.
Monthly active users fell by 17.8% in the U.S. year-over-year while web traffic was down 7% globally, according to SimilarWeb. The average time spent on the site fell just by 2% globally during the third quarter.
Advertising revenue also cratered, per the Axios report:
While most tech firms have experienced slower ad growth over the past year, X’s advertising business has nosedived. Musk himself admitted in September that the company’s U.S. ad business was down 60%.
The company will reportedly bring in nearly $3 billion from advertising revenue for the year, which is down from approximately $4.1 billion during the previous year.
