X Lost 15% of Users in First Year of Elon Musk’s Ownership
X, rebranded from Twitter after billionaire Elon Musk’s takeover of the social media platform, has seen plummeting usage and advertisers in the first year under his ownership, according to data provided to Axios.
Usage plummeted for X, with monthly active users falling 14.8% globally and 17.8% in the U.S. year-over-year for September, according to data from SimilarWeb. X’s web traffic was down 7% globally and 11.6% in the U.S. for the first 9 months of the year.
App downloads for X fell roughly 38% globally between Oct. 2022 and Sept. 2023. In the same period, U.S. downloads fell 57%, per data from Sensor Tower.
The social media platform also saw the average daily time spent on X per user fall 2% year-over-year globally in the third quarter of 2023. And the platform’s churn increased over 30% year-over-year as of September 2023.
However, according to Axios, Elon Musk’s personal traffic is more than healthy. His profile on X and posts saw traffic rise 96% year-over-year in September.
Musk recently appointed former NBCUniversal advertising executive Linda Yaccarino as CEO of X, who has since claimed that users are swiftly coming back to the platform. In August, Yaccarino told CNBC that the social media platform had “half a billion users all over the world showing up multiple times a day.”
Yaccarino has also suggested that advertisers are returning to X, however, reporting suggests that a vast majority of the largest spending advertisers have halted efforts on the platform in the last year.
X has recently been under fire for the proliferation of misinformation circulating on the platform regarding the Israel-Gaza conflict. The social media company claims that they are taking adequate measures to regulate such misinformation and have prided themselves on the community notes feature which they claim is “helping to keep users on X informed.”
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