Getty Image / Alain Jocard / AFP
Since Elon Musk bought and took over Twitter on October 27, 2022 there have been countless changes to the social network once known as the ‘Internet’s town square.’
Daily and monthly users are down both globally and domestically, but new data suggests Elon Musk’s X if headed the way of MySpace as no social network has ever recovered from massive user base losses like what Elon‘s network is seeing.
Sensor Tower, a market analysis company in the Bay Area, determined that Elon’s X is seeing traffic down 18% year-over year in the United States, when looking at February 2024 vs. February 2023. The overall X user base is also down 23% from when Elon Musk took over in November 2022.
This graph shows X (Twitter), Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok user base changes since the moment Elon Musk took over in November ’22.
Fewer people are using X than when Elon Musk took over…. https://t.co/RABw6NlhKt pic.twitter.com/CBPbh0bBJJ
— Ben Goggin (@BenjaminGoggin) March 23, 2024
There was an interesting thread on X from Sunday comparing Twitter’s demise to MySpace. It was a generous take, in my humble opinion, emphasizing that MySpace’s decline was long and drawn out. And it stop short of definitively saying that Elon Musk’s X will be put out to pasture like MySpace was, but calls out a reported 32% drop in global advertising reach on X in conjunction with the plunge in users.
Meanwhile, the elephant in the room that Elon refuses to acknowledge is Meta’s Threads. It’s a rapidly growing social network with an upbeat user base who aren’t there to sow panic about every single aspect of society as is so common on X. BroBible’s on Threads. I’ve been posting memes there a bunch from our branded account. If you’re not following us yet, do so here:
Post by @brobibleView on Threads
There are currently 130 million monthly users on Threads according to a recent TechCrunch headline. Elon Musk recently claimed X has 550 million monthly users. So Threads is lagging behind X but Twitter was founded in 2006 and has a nearly 18-year head start on Threads.
Can Elon Musk’s X Regain Users?
Casey Newton has emerged as a popular influencer on Threads and he was quick to point out that no social network or any silicon valley company at all has been able to rebound after losing as many users in a year as Elon’s X has.
Unless Elon is able to pull off something never before seen in Silicon Valley, X will continue to lose users and it will eventually be sold off for parts or rebranded into something so unrecognizable that the site’s owners can claim that was always the plan.
Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz has an interesting thread on how Threads can overtake Twitter in the coming months and the challenges that stand in the way of growth.
Interestingly, the future success of Threads is at this point independent of Elon Musk’s X. Meta already has a gargantuan user base compared to X, they just need to convert those users into Threads users by being able to surface real-time news/memes before those moments have passed.
At the crux of Dustin Moskovitz’s case for Threads is how timely social media is. Surfacing the most important tweets to hundreds of millions of users was something Twitter did a really great job of in years past but that’s not really the case anymore. Twitter is now largely a pay-to-play model due to ‘Blue’ which offers more visibility and a crowded/useless replies section.
Threads is far from perfect but it will be interesting to see how the network develops as X continues to hemorrhage users year over year. It will also be interesting to see if Elon Musk has any sort of a face-saving exit strategy if and when operating X becomes untenable. He purchased Twitter $44 billion and a report last Fall from Fortune claimed X might now be worth just $4 billion, a 90% decline.
At its peak, MySpace was valued at $12 billion in 2007. It was sold for just $35 million in 2011.
I’ve loved Twitter over the years. I’ve been there since 2008, I was verified prior to Elon removing verification, and couldn’t have cared less about losing the blue checkmark but watching the spam get out of control and the complete and utter trash shown as ads along with the moronic tweets featured in my timeline… There haven’t been many reasons to stick around on X in the long-term in my experience and it’s not difficult to see why millions of users are leaving.