One Year Into Musk’s Ownership, X (Twitter) Down By Every Measure

Similarweb estimates of web and app engagement trending down for everything (except Elon Musk’s profile)

If Elon Musk wanted to build traffic to his social media profile, surely there must have been a cheaper and easier way. Coming up on a year after his $44 billion purchase of Twitter, recently rebranded as X, traffic to twitter.com/elonmusk/ is just about the only positive metric of success we can find.

Key takeaways

• In September, global web traffic to twitter.com was down -14%, year-over-year, and traffic to the ads.twitter.com portal for advertisers was down -16.5%, according to Similarweb estimates.
• In the US, where about a quarter of twitter.com’s web traffic originates, September traffic was down -19%. The trend was similar, if not quite as pronounced in other countries: -11.6% in the UK, -13.4% in France,  -17.9% in Germany, and -17.5% in Australia.
• Performance on mobile was no better, down -17.8% year-over-year based on combined monthly active users for iOS and Android in the US. Worldwide, Android usage was down -14.8%.
• The numbers for September are consistent with longer-term trends. If we compare the first 9 months of 2023 with the same period in 2022, twitter.com traffic is down 11.6% year-over-year in the US and 7% worldwide. Mobile app usage in the US is down 12.8% in that period.
• On the plus side, traffic to Elon Musk’s profile and posts was up 96% year-over-year in September.
• The downdraft is not unique to X, with other leading social networks also seeing negative comparisons. In aggregate, traffic to the top 100 social networks and communities that Similarweb tracks was down -3.7% year-over-year in September. But nothing Musk has done seems to have translated into lasting improvements to compete better against the social networks that are continuing to grow strongly, such as TikTok, for which global web traffic was up 22.8% in September.
• Musk’s ongoing feud with the media could cause further deterioration in the utility of X as a news source. Certainly, it has reduced the significance of Twitter as a traffic source for publishers. For example, three years ago the New York Times website nytimes.com was getting 3% to 4% or more of its total traffic from twitter.com referrals, but that’s dropped to less than 1% in recent months. Recently, Musk has championed removing the headlines from the preview of news articles users post to the service as a way of keeping users from clicking away.

Musk’s decision to acquire Twitter, as it was then known, appears to have been one of history’s biggest impulse purchases. He announced his intention to buy the service in April 2022, but between then and the day he walked in the door of Twitter’s headquarters as its new owner, a year ago this month, the hostile takeover turned into a shotgun marriage. Once Twitter’s board decided to accept his offer, Musk began equivocating about whether he would follow through.

The board sued to compel him to close the deal, while Musk claimed Twitter wasn’t worth what he had offered because it was so overrun by bots. Similarweb’s Twitter bot research project found no evidence that the presence of bots was much greater than Twitter’s leaders had publicly acknowledged, and the first few court hearings convinced Musk he might not prevail at trial – causing him to change his mind again and complete the purchase.

While Musk’s stewardship of Twitter, now X, has been controversial, none of the potential competitors seems to have lured away more than a fraction of its users.

Twitter.com versus the competition on the web

Although some of the other leading social networks also appear to be losing traffic, Twitter’s performance has been worse in recent months, as it was in September, when it was down -14%, although Facebook was not that far behind with web traffic down -10.4%.

The decline has not been a plunge – there have been month-to-month increases along the way – but the overall trend is downward.

X versus the competition on mobile

Several of the leading social networks also saw declining engagement on mobile apps in September, but X was down more, with combined monthly active users for iOS and Android down -17.8%, based on estimates for the US. Similarweb estimates for worldwide usage on Android show a similar decline.

You can’t see TikTok’s app performance on this chart because its usage was essentially unchanged, but the user count for Facebook was down -8%, and even Instagram was down -3.7%.

As on the web, app usage has had its ups and downs – but mostly downs.

X remains one of the largest social networks

The twitter.com website trails facebook.com but remains one of the most trafficked social network and online community domains.

However, the X app is farther back in the pack of social apps Americans carry with them on their mobile devices.

Worldwide, the standings on Android are similar.

On the plus side: Elon Musk’s own X / Twitter brand

Musk was already one of Twitter’s most prolific and popular users pre-acquisition, and the attention paid to his profile and posts soared once he was in charge and promising big changes. While not quite the frenzy reached in October / November of last year, when visits to his pages topped 90 million visits based on desktop web alone, traffic continues to increase at a slow boil. Even his harshest critics still on the platform have to stay tuned in to keep track of what he will change next as he reshapes the platform in his own image.

The only individual who might be able to challenge Musk is Donald J. Trump, the former president Musk has not yet been able to lure back. While his account was reinstated, reversing a policy Musk disagreed with, Trump has posted just once – sharing the mug shot from his arraignment in Georgia – while otherwise sticking to Truth Social, another egocentric social platform.

Failing? Or just not succeeding yet?

Despite having hired a CEO, media executive Linda Yaccarino, Musk continues to lead via a series of decrees delivered as tweets (or whatever we’re supposed to call them now). He continues to defend the “free speech absolutist” policies critics to encourage the spread of white supremacist rhetoric and conspiracy theories. Many of his pronouncements, such as the recent suggestion that X will begin charging all users for access, have spurred pundits to say “now, he’s finally done it – this is the end!”

And yet, somehow the X / Twitter audience has eroded but not evaporated.

Musk has said that X will evolve into an “everything app” for ecommerce and financial transactions, not just social media interaction. Maybe that will be a wild success if it ever materializes. For now, though, the service continues on a slow spiral downward.

The Similarweb Insights & Communications team is available to pull additional or updated data on request for the news media (journalists are invited to write to press@similarweb.com). When citing our data, please reference Similarweb as the source and link back to the most relevant blog post or similarweb.com/blog/insights/.

Methodology

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Image by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay

by David F. Carr

David covers social media, digital advertising, and generative AI. With a background in web trends since the 1990s, he’s also the author of "Social Collaboration for Dummies".