Ok, I know Elon Musk fans are going to hate me because sharing anything other than praising Elon and X means I’m against free speech, truth, freedom in general, or whatever.
But the fact is that Elon and co., whether intentionally or not, continue to make false claims about the relative success of X, which has instead been steadily losing ground in the broader social media space.
Over the past week, Elon has once again spread misleading reports about X surpassing Meta in app usage and that X is the “number one news app.”
I’m not saying these claims are completely false, but the way they are framed is disingenuous at best.
First, this (reposted by Musk):
This is based on data from SimilarWeb, a platform that measures web traffic and provides insights into the performance of different sites. And there’s some creative freedom there in terms of what these numbers are measuring. Web traffic onlySo this only measures visits to x.com in a web browser – these numbers do not include app usage.
Why is that important? According to user data reported by X, approximately X 88.55% of users log into the app via mobile devices.
That means that of X’s reported 250 million daily active users, only 29 million are logged in via the website, so this usage graph only measures the usage of a small portion of X’s user base. In terms of overall usage, X isn’t anywhere near Facebook or IG.
To be clear, Facebook has over 2 billion daily active users, the majority of whom access the app exclusively on mobile, while an even higher percentage of IG’s nearly 1 billion daily active users only log into the platform via mobile devices. In actual numbers, Facebook has 8x more daily users than X, and IG has 4x more DAU than X.
As such, this data only measures a small portion of each app’s usage – so if more people log into X’s website than Instagram.com, you’re effectively only comparing 12% of X’s users to roughly 5% of IG’s.
That doesn’t actually prove anything.
But surely there is something more to it than that? The fact that X has more desktop users logging in than Facebook and IG users is a big indicator of how much of a difference there is in the number of desktop users logging in, especially in October last year. SimilarWeb reported that X’s mobile and web visits have fallen 14% since September 2022.
Now, I have a few questions about this graph:
Part of the increase in traffic to x.com was due to a switch from twitter.com, which caused a big increase in traffic numbers. But would traffic double from May to June?
Either way, the bottom line is that X is clearly not beating Facebook or Instagram in overall usage, making the framing of these claims questionable. This raises questions about all the data X shares.
Includes:
Sure, X tops the App Store’s rankings for “news” apps, but that’s because it’s not actually a “news” app, and when you look at the competition in that category, it’s not at all surprising to see social media platforms winning that race.
So why is X listed as a “news” app?
Back in 2016, after several quarters of slowing growth (while Facebook and Instagram were doing well), Twitter executives were under pressure to turn things around to capitalize on the app’s opportunity. Twitter’s former CEO, Jack Dorsey, came up with a genius plan to change the growth story: What if Twitter reclassified itself into the “News” category on the App Store, out of the “Social Media” segment it was never going to win in?
Twitter certainly has a lot of news content, a lot of news publishers post on it, it’s kind of a news app, right?
Since then, Twitter/X has been featured in the “News” section of the Apple App Store and has maintained the number one “News” app position for 8 years. This has not changed recently and X has not trended up the news charts, topping the category because X is a social platform and not a news app. In fact, X cannot be featured in the “News” category of the Google Play Store because it relies on user-generated content.
In other words, this is not a “news” app.
Seeing as Elon and his supporters are promoting X as the leading “news” app; France, VenezuelaBasically, all the areas where Elon has expressed concerns about leadership:
Twitter/X has always been the top news app. It is not a news app and should not be compared to smaller apps that are not as heavily used as Twitter/X.
This again raises questions about Elon’s measurement methodology and the data he highlights to his 200 million followers, as it is misleading and projects a false interpretation of the app’s success.
Here’s the truth: X hasn’t increased its daily active users since it first reported hitting 250 million DAU in November 2022. That’s 20 months of no growth in usage. X has reported growth in monthly active users, 500 million monthly users It’s now at 570 million, up from 500 million in March 2023. So, it looks like interest is growing, but adding 70 million new monthly users in 17 months doesn’t mean interest is growing substantially.
However, X also claims to have taken action against bots, which would have resulted in the removal of millions of profiles, which may have led to higher growth than the raw numbers suggest.
That’s why Elon is so keen to tout “user seconds per day.”Instead, use “” as a key indicator of engagement and activity.
On that note, X recently reported that it served 361.9 billion seconds of service per day to users in the second quarter. On average, that equates to 24 minutes per day per user on the app, down from the 30 minutes per day per user that X claimed in March.
Additionally, it has been reported that X’s revenues are down about 50% at this point in the year compared to 2023.
So overall, X is not doing well. That may be fine with Elon and co., as they may see it as the cost of “protecting free speech”, or what they think it is. But the point here is that Elon continues to exaggerate misleading statistics about the performance of his platform, which, upon deeper analysis, do not deliver on the promises they claim.
I mean, I suppose people see what they want to see anyway, but to be clear, such a claim doesn’t sum up X’s current situation entirely accurately.
