October 2022 — Elon Musk buys Twitter, to the chagrin of most users. After changing the name, users have long reported that the platform is dying, with an influx of bots, spam accounts, and the return of some of the worst people in the world. X, as it's now known, has just had its September numbers and stats released, and backing up the experience of users, it doesn’t look good for the newly ‘refreshed’ platform.
Unless, apparently, your name is Elon Musk.
X is dying
Similarweb has just released a report filled to the brim with interesting stats that tell a curious story about the health of X. First, the big headline stat — over the month of September, traffic to the site has dropped -19%. That’s in the US alone, and there’s a similar story across the rest of the world, with a -11.6% drop in the UK, -13.4% in France, -17.9% in Germany and -17.5% in Australia.
Oh dear.
While these aren’t precipitous drops, combined with the continuous drop in traffic and user engagement since Musk first took over, it speaks volumes about the health of the platform since the South African ‘entrepreneur’ bought the social media site for a cool $44 billion. It also tells us that all of Musk's changes aren’t doing good things for the site, with new features like the premium blue check mark falling flat.
It’s not a drop completely unique to X. The traffic to the top 100 social networks has dropped by -3.7% year on year as well — although that number is obviously not as high as X’s impressive effort. There seems to be only one winner in the X numbers game, and it’s not the users, advertisers, or even the media who just had headlines removed from Twitter in an effort to stop users clicking away from the site. It’s not even X itself.
It’s Musk, of course. The only positive number out of all of them is visits to Musks account, which have risen by 96%. In a reasonable world, this would be users visiting his account to give him a nice, healthy block. Chances are it’s just people curious as to what he’s calling ‘interesting’ now, or what fresh new issue he’s ‘looking into.’
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