Latest Report Suggests that X Usage is Declining Amid Various Changes on the App

It looks as if X’s reported numbers might be flawed, or that it could be losing audience as more changes are implemented by Elon Musk and his team.

In accordance with a brand new evaluation by Apptopia, which tracks the usage habits of greater than 100,000 mobile app users, X currently has around 121 million every day energetic users, which is significantly lower than the 253 million reported by X itself.

As reported by Big Technology:

“Since Musk bought the corporate in October 2022, it’s lost roughly 13% of its every day energetic users. And its rebrand from Twitter to X accelerated the decline.”

Apptopia’s evaluation also suggests that those that are using the app are using it just as much as all the time, with no significant negative impact on average time spent, while the arrival of Threads hasn’t had a direct correlating impact on X’s decline to this point.

However the figures do suggest that X will not be doing in addition to Musk and CEO Linda Yaccarino have been suggesting of their various presentations to the general public.

There have been many questions on X’s user metrics, and specifically, the accuracy of Musk’s claims that the platform has reached various “record highs” in usage since he took ownership.

And it’s not only the metrics themselves, it’s the detail inside.

For instance, X claimed the platform reached a brand new record high of 250 million monetizable every day energetic users (mDAU) just weeks after Musk took over on the platform. Yet Elon, in his efforts to wriggle out of his $44 billion takeover offer, also claimed that 20% of the platform’s users were actually bots.

So if Elon, as he also claims, has eradicated bots (or at the least significantly reduced their presence), that may mean that X had one way or the other added not only an additional 12 million users from its Q2 2022 report, it’s last performance update before Elon acquired that app, but that it had also replaced some 47.6 million fake profiles with real people inside that very same period.

Or that Elon was lying about that 20% stat simply to get out of getting to pay for the app (through which case, are you able to trust what he’s saying now?) Or that bots are still present, and prevalent in its figures.

I don’t know where the reality lies, but for a platform that has historically struggled to add any greater than 20 million latest users per yr, adding almost 60 million in only just a few months looks as if lots.

Which is why X’s user counts seem questionable, while X’s claim that it now has 550 million monthly energetic users would even be suspect, based on these latest figures.

On average, every day versus monthly user stats reported by social platforms are multiplied by around 1.8x. Snapchat, for instance, has 397 million every day actives, and 700 million monthly users, as per its official reports.

Going by this logic, and using these newly reported numbers as an indicator, X more likely has around 223 million monthly actives, which is a major variance in actual usage.

Reinforcing this further, Apptopia’s evaluation also suggests that there’s “a widening gap between individuals who check the app every day vs. monthly”.

So it could even be lower than the typical, which might put X’s actual audience behind Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, and Pinterest when it comes to energetic users.

After all, that is all relative from a marketing evaluation perspective. In case your audience is energetic on X, then that’s where you have to be energetic as well, no matter overall usage. 121 million every day actives can also be still lots of attention, while X’s influence has all the time been more significant than its audience count, so there’s reason, beyond the raw figures, to make use of the app.

However it does present an interesting alternative vision on X’s performance, which can also be still down 60% year-over-year in ad revenue, while its subscription offerings, which it had hoped would offset ad revenue losses, are also still struggling to realize significant take-up.

But nevertheless, Elon and Co. are focused on other stats anyway, with the X owner repeatedly touting latest metrics like ‘unregretted user minutes’ and ‘cumulative user seconds’, which he claims at the moment are repeatedly hitting latest highs.

Possibly, these alternative stats show that X is definitely improving its user experience, even when it does have a smaller audience overall, and perhaps that’s the reset that it needs so as to get the platform re-aligned around Elon’s ‘all the things app’ vision.

Time will tell, but with Threads seemingly gaining traction more recently, it does look like there’s a growing opportunity for an X competitor, as usage dips lower than the corporate itself is reporting.