Elon Musk Says X Users Are Posting Fewer Posts Per Day Than People Had Been Tweeting

In amongst the assorted notes and statements that Elon Musk shared in his interview with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Monday, Musk also made some interesting remarks about X usage, and the way it’s modified under his management.

Musk has repeatedly stated that X continues to succeed in all-time highs in “device user seconds”, a vague denominator which just isn’t comparable to other apps (as they don’t share this info), while Musk has also said that X’s lively users are well up on what they were under Twitter, now sitting on 253 million every day actives (up from 238m in Twitter’s last performance report prior to the acquisition), and 540 million monthly users.

Musk reported one other increase in X’s monthly usage again in his discussion Monday, while also highlighting an extra interesting data point that’s worthy of note.

As per Musk:  

“There are 500 million, um, 550 million monthly users, now going to perhaps 600 million monthly users, and any given day there’s on the order of 100 to 200 million posts to the system.”

100 million to 200 million posts is quite a bit, needless to say, but when that’s accurate, that truly means that individuals are posting quite a bit less to X than they used on Twitter.

Back in 2013, Twitter reported that it saw, on average, 500 million posts per day, a number that it’s repeatedly used as a benchmark for its performance. X management even referred to that very same figure in March this 12 months, as a part of a blog post about its advice algorithm:

“Twitter goals to deliver you one of the best of what’s happening on the earth at once. This requires a advice algorithm to distill the roughly 500 million Tweets posted every day all the way down to a handful of top Tweets that ultimately show up in your device’s For You timeline.” 

200 million, or 100 million posts, is quite a bit less X activity, a decline of, potentially, some 400%.

Musk did also say that he’s excluding re-posts from this figure, which may very well be a consider the entire calculation, while X has also, reportedly, rid the platform of loads of bots, one other potential activity hit.

Nevertheless it does look like a giant variance.

Which, actually, might make some sense, when you furthermore may consider the broader social media usage trend away from public posting. Nevertheless it also implies that X is increasingly reliant on a small variety of its most lively users, whom it needs to maintain posting, as a way to keep people coming back.

Back in 2021, Pew Research published a study which showed that the highest 25% of lively Twitter users within the U.S. produce around 97% of all tweets out there.

Twitter had around 95 million U.S. users, which might mean that the platform’s core lively user cohort is barely around 24 million people within the region. So while Twitter could have had 238 million total users, only a fraction of them were actually posting, and if these recent figures that Musk’s shared are correct, there could now be quite a bit fewer people bothering to post in any respect.

That’s likely why its X Premium push has failed to realize traction, because the entire advantages of this system, like extra reach, recognition, even post editing, are for people who actually post to the app. Which is now a tiny amount.

It also suggests that X’s “device user seconds” stat may very well be misleading, by way of overall engagement. It wouldn’t surprise me in any respect if a smaller group of users is spending quite a bit more time within the app consequently of the newest changes under Elon. But with far fewer posts, it seems unlikely that, overall, more persons are spending more time on X.

The numbers could also point to a possibility for a competitor, provided that reaching competitive scale is less difficult than the top-line usage stats may suggest.

As noted, it is also that Twitter was counting re-tweets in its numbers, and perhaps, with bot activity factored in, 200 million posts per day is definitely more comparable than it seems.

Nevertheless it’s a giant variance, which is interesting to notice in broader context.