Recently speaking to CNBC’s Julia Boorstin at Vox Media’s Code 2023 event recently, CEO for X, Linda Yaccarino stated twitter daily active users are depleting. Also, during the 45-minute-long interview, she shared previously unknown stats of the company.
Throughout the interview, she repeated that she’s only been on the job at X for 12 weeks. She revealed that X, formerly Twitter daily active users has declined. She added this was after Elon Musk took over Twitter.
Losing Twitter daily active users
At the tech conference, Ms. Yaccarino shared that the company currently has 225 million daily active users, a decline in tens of millions or 11.6 per cent of users from just before Elon Musk took over twitter.
Last year, Elon Musk posted a series of tweets which showed that Twitter had 254.5 million active users the week before his takeover.
X revised its daily active user count to 245 million daily active users. She said that X had 225 million active users, Ms. Yaccarinno previously cited “200 to 250 million” daily active users earlier in the interview.
According to stats shared by her, X is losing millions or around 3.7 per cent of daily active users from before Musk’s acquisition.
The report claims that the twitter daily active users are even down from the numbers that Musk shared last year when he was in charge. Twitter had 259.4 million daily active users in mid-November 2022. X has lost nearly 15 million users, a drop of roughly 5.6 per cent.
Twitter daily active users metrics
Twitter first started sharing metric, which the company refers to as monetizable daily active users or mDAU, years before Musk even planned to buy the company. The reason? Twitter’s daily active user numbers were reliably more favorable for the company than its other metrics when it shared its quarterly reports for investors and shareholders.
When Ms. Yaccarino was asked about user metrics, she tried to move away from the topic and said X had 200 and 250 daily active users. She also said the platform had 50,000 communities and engagement numbers were up since June.
She then said that X had 550 million monthly active users. It’s unclear how much monthly active user growth has happened under Musk’s leadership.
X’s profitability
She also said that X will be profitable in 2024. “Now that I have immersed myself in the business, and we have a good set of eyes on what is predictable, what’s coming is that it looks like in early ’24, we will be turning a profit,” she said onstage at the Code Conference.
She also claimed, “90% of the top 100 advertisers have returned to the platform in the last 12 weeks alone.”
It’s unclear, however, just how much of the monthly active user growth has happened under Musk when compared to how the company was doing prior to his takeover. That’s because in 2019, Twitter stopped reporting this number in favor of the daily active user metric. The company entered that year with 321 million monthly active users, the last publicly reported monthly active user metric directly from Twitter.
It should be noted that Musk has shifted away from both the daily and monthly active user numbers in favor of “unregretted user minutes,” a metric seemingly made-up by Musk.
