Impact of the Latest Musk Outrage? Just a Continuing -14% Trend

Perceived anti-semitic remarks and “Go f*** yourself” blend into broader pattern. Ad portal traffic actually trended up in November.

The collapse of X, the social network formerly known as Twitter, has been predicted for so long that every new reason given for why users and advertisers will (or should) abandon the platform tends to blend into the background noise. Yet while the events of the last few weeks may not destroy X, either, it continues to experience a steady erosion of about 14%, year over year, in key metrics of engagement with users and advertisers.

Twitter owner Elon Musk has been in the news lately for a tweet widely interpreted as supporting anti-semitic conspiracy theories, which in turn led to major advertisers such as Disney pulling their ads. Far from working to mollify the concerns of major advertisers, on Wednesday Musk told them “Go f*** yourself” during an onstage interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin at the New York Times DealBook Summit.

Major advertisers may continue to pull back, potentially bankrupting X (as Musk acknowledged, although he was sure users would blame the advertisers instead of him). However, we have yet to see an impact on traffic to the ads portal that the larger pool of advertisers visit.

Key takeaways

• A preliminary November estimate of traffic to twitter.com, where X continues to do business on the web, is that it will be down 13.8% year-over-year to 5.9 billion visits, compared with 6.8 billion in November 2022.
• For October, unique visitors to the website were down 13.6% year-over-year to 731 million.
• Visits to the X ads portal at ads.twitter.com might actually wind up being up slightly (3.2% year-over-year) based on a preliminary estimate for November 2023. However, if we look at ad portal traffic for the past 12 months, it’s down 14% compared with the prior year.
• In the US, where we have the best estimates for iOS and Android monthly active users, that count is down 6.5% to 85.9 million. However, on Android, where we have better worldwide numbers, we estimate that monthly active users are down 16% year-over-year.

Decline on the web ~ -14%

Twitter has had its ups and downs over the past year, but the overall pattern is downward.

The pattern for the ads portal has been much the same, not collapsing but trending downward.

The metrics, side-by-side

Here is what it all adds up to, across several metrics that we track.

How long can X keep defying gravity?

As you can see, the ballpark figure of “about -14%” isn’t universal, but it is a recurring theme. The ad portal trend currently looks like an exception, but that may be a factor of year-over-year comparisons with the early months of Musk’s tenure, when there was also great uncertainty about the future of the platform and the merits of advertising on it.

Still, for mass-market advertiser interest to be up while the audience declines seems like an unsustainable trend. And even if small advertisers continue to engage with the platform, the big ones with big budgets who are hearing that Musk is happy to see them go may not.

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Report By: David F. Carr, Senior Insights Manager

Methodology

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