X, formerly Twitter, has plummeted badly in the most fundamental of user and advertiser metrics in its first year under Elon Musk’s ownership, according to new data compiled and published by Axios.
While backers who supported Musk's $44 billion purchase of the company hoped his track record would supercharge X’s popularity and value, it appears the opposite has happened since Musk closed the purchase on October 27, 2022, and immediately took the social media platform private under his control.
Between October 2022 and September 2023, X app downloads fell roughly 38% globally, according to Sensor Tower estimates.
According to the same data, the average time spent daily on X per user fell 2% year-over-year globally in the third quarter of 2023, with individual browsing sessions dipping 4% in that period.
Additionally, total usage has fallen, with the number of monthly active users falling 14.8% globally and 17.8% in the U.S. year-over-year for September, according to data from SimilarWeb.
User churn, or users who stopped using the app, also grew by more than 30% as of September 2023.
And to top it all off, X web traffic is down 7.6% globally and 11.6% in the U.S for the first 9 months of 2023 compared to the same period last year, per Similarweb.
According to Axios’ report, the only bright spots are that global first-time downloads of the mobile app have remained stable, and that traffic to Elon Musk’s personal account increased by 96% year over year in September.
In an August interview with CNBC, X CEO Linda Yaccarino maintained confidence, claiming that the platform has “half a billion users all over the world showing up multiple times a day.”
She also said that advertisers would return “back to X” after an exodus from the platform.
While most tech firms have struggled to maintain ad growth over the past year, the decrease in X’s engagement coupled with concerns about brand safety and misinformation have pushed advertisers away from the platform, leading to a 60% dip in advertising revenue, according to Musk himself.
And while Yaccarino may be hopeful for the return of advertisers, third-party estimates suggest an overwhelming majority of the world’s biggest-spending advertisers have wholly stopped advertising on X in the past year.
Estimates by Insider Intelligence predict that X’s ad business will bring in only $2.9 billion this year, down from roughly $4.14 billion in 2022.
Other social networks have seen usage drops, with the top 100 social media apps taking a dip in traffic by 3.7% year-over-year in September. But the broader decline is simply not to the scale of what X is experiencing.
Meanwhile, some apps have grown, with TikTok seeing spikes in traffic as large as 22.8% year-over-year in September, per Similarweb.
