Elon Musk took charge of X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, just over one year ago. It hasn’t been all smooth sailing for the social media site with big ambitions.
The
Tesla
CEO has ushered in major changes with mixed success since he spent $44 billion to acquire Twitter in October 2022. The company recently told employees that it is worth approximately $19 billion, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday, citing an internal document.
Traffic trends, fleeing advertisers, and tougher competition help explain the plunge in valuation.
In September, global web traffic to Twitter was down 14% from the same month a year ago and traffic to its portal for advertisers was down 17%, according to estimates from Similarweb, a digital data and analytics company.
While the traffic drop wasn’t unique to X, it was relatively pronounced. Traffic to the top 100 social networks and communities that Similarweb tracks was down 3.7% over the same period. Part of the decline in overall traffic could be related to Musk’s efforts to purge bot accounts from the site.
X didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. The social-media platform reported in October that on average 1.5 million people are signing up for the platform every day, up 4% from last year, and said it had more than 500 million monthly users. SimilarWeb estimates X had just over 75 million monthly users across the iOS and Android mobile platforms in September.
A dip in X’s traffic could be a positive sign for
Meta Platforms
(META), which launched its own microblogging platform in July to attract disaffected X users. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said this week that Threads has under 100 million monthly users.
Direct comparisons are difficult as monthly users are counted differently across platforms. Similarweb estimates that Threads had 6.7 million monthly active users across iOS and Android in September, considerably less than its estimate for X.
If you believe Musk, a microblogging face off with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is the least of his ambitions. Musk has described the Twitter acquisition as a way to accelerate his vision of developing an “everything app”—a mobile app for social networking, content, video, and financial services similar to superapps in Asia like
WeChat.
According to a Bloomberg report, Musk told X employees in an all-company meeting that the platform will take on
Alphabet’s
(GOOGL) video-sharing platform YouTube and
Microsoft’s
(MSFT) professional-networking site LinkedIn in the future. X didn’t respond to a request for comment on the report.
Video has become a major priority for Musk, who has taken the first steps to make X more of a video platform by launching a live video broadcast function and testing videogame streaming like that seen on Twitch. However, X is still a long way from being able to take on YouTube—which received 31.9 billion visits in September, per SimilarWeb, compared with 955 million for X—as a hub for content creators. X is even further away from becoming a go-to site for professional networking like LinkedIn, which says it has more than 950 million members.
Perhaps X’s biggest problem is one that’s likely to remain. Many advertisers fled the social-media platform after Musk’s takeover. Last month, Musk said that X’s U.S. advertising revenue was down 60% since the acquisition.
Musk hired CEO Linda Yaccarino in May. The advertising executive is expected to be able to attract brands back to the platform. In a blog post last Thursday, Yaccarino said 1,700 advertisers returned to X in the preceding quarter, including 90 of the top 100 ad spenders from a year ago. It’s not clear how much they are spending now.
Musk has focused publicly on premium users instead of advertisers. Last week, he launched two new tiers of subscriptions, adding further options to the existing X Premium service. The company hasn’t disclosed how many premium subscribers it has.
Still, with far fewer users than YouTube and LinkedIn and without big advertisers spending on the platform, it’s hard to see how X can mount a major challenge to the social-media giants.
Write to Adam Clark at [email protected]
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