Musk claims X usage hits peak after presidential debate

Now, I need to explain this in a bit more detail.

Following the first-ever US presidential debate last weekend, X owner Elon Musk shared the stats, claiming that usage of the platform had reached an “all-time high.”

But all independent reports suggest that usage of X is declining, that X is becoming less relevant and visible, and that Musk’s social media experiment hasn’t been very successful so far.

So is X hitting an all-time high, or is Elon just creating a new metric and selling it as a point of success?

Well, without all the data available, it’s hard to say.

First, let’s look at the metrics provided: Elon claims that X has logged a total of 76 billion user-seconds in the US.

There’s no time frame for this, but perhaps 76 billion seconds is one day. This equates to over 21 million cumulative hours spent in the app, which is obviously quite high profile. However, if you divide this by the total number of US users (100 million), it equates to 12.6 minutes per US user.

Considering that X reported in March that users spend an average of 30 minutes per day on X, this isn’t a good thing.

That’s why it’s important to further qualify these numbers, because I actually suspect that X doesn’t have 100 million daily active users in the US, and that this may be a monthly usage figure, but even if you reduce the number of daily active users in the US to 50 million, based on these metrics, that still only comes to 25 minutes per US user per day.

This is a much less impressive figure than 76 billion user seconds.

That’s probably why Musk and others are shifting the focus to bigger numbers, but they’re also more misleading because they don’t take into account actual reach: Advertisers want to know how many people they can reach with their promotions within an app, and in that sense, cumulative seconds is actually a less useful metric.

But Elon said that users “The hardest game to play” So it’s the best indicator of actual human engagement. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but X has adopted it, so this is the statistic they share.

And according to X, even when broken down into fractions per user, it has reached new heights in this area.

But is it all of Twitter and X, or just X? And if just X, is it just one year’s worth of data?

We don’t know, it’s all very speculative and not directly comparable to numbers reported by other platforms, so it doesn’t really mean anything — unless you’re within X and want to celebrate some new milestone.

So is Musk right? If so, then usage of X is declining across the board, because when you break down the user-seconds numbers, they’re not all that impressive.

But the bottom line is that if the audience is there, it may be worth it as an advertising platform. Any considerations that extend beyond that are up to your own personal perspective.