By now, you may have heard about Elon Musk’s handpicked CEO for X, Linda Yaccarino, and her disastrous interview with CNBC’s Julia Boorstin at Vox Media’s Code 2023 event. However, somewhat overlooked amid some of the more viral moments of the discussion, Yaccarino dropped some previously unknown stats that don’t exactly paint such a rosy picture for the company:

X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, is losing daily active users under the leadership of Elon Musk.

Speaking at Vox Media’s Code 2023 tech conference earlier this week, X CEO Linda Yaccarino shared that the company currently has 225 million daily active users – a decline in tens of millions or 11.6 percent of users from just before Musk acquired the company.

According to a series of tweets that Musk himself posted in November of last year, Twitter had 254.5 million daily active users the week before his takeover in late November of last year.

Following the conference, X revised its daily active user count to 245 million daily active users, according to The Information. Before specifically saying X had 225 million active users, Yaccarinno previously cited “200 to 250 million” daily active users earlier in the interview.

However, even X’s revised number of 245 million daily active users would still see X lose millions or around 3.7 percent of daily active users from before Musk’s acquisition.

In fact, daily active users are even down from the numbers that Musk shared last year when he was in charge. According to the aforementioned Musk tweet, Twitter had 259.4 million daily active users in mid-November 2022. Compared to the daily active users Twitter was pulling late last year under Musk’s leadership, X has shed nearly 15 million users – a drop of roughly 5.6 percent.

Twitter first started sharing this 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 Yaccarino was first asked about user metrics during the interview, she seemingly wanted to move away from that particular conversation, saying that X had between 200 and 250 daily active users. She then moved the discussion to the platform’s Communities feature, the company’s answer to Facebook Groups, saying X had 50,000 communities and that engagement numbers and time spent in those communities were up since June.

Along with the daily active user metrics, Yaccarino also shared that X now has a record 550 million monthly active users. This would be up from the 541 million “monthly users” metric that Musk shared in a post in July.

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.

  • Bloody Harry@feddit.de
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    9 months ago

    What I find most interesting, though, is that there were only 250 Million daily active users in the first place. Musk paid like 176 bucks per user. There’s no way he could’ve milked that much revenue out of the users in any reasonable time frame.

    Sure, there’s weekly and monthly active users, but how many ads can you possibly show someone who spends 5 minutes per week on formerly-known-as-Twitter?

    • Takios@feddit.de
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      9 months ago

      Looking at his recent posts it looks like he didn’t buy it to make money but to increase his influence. Just recently he promoted a post that calls to vote for the farright party in Germany for example.

      • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        That was the one bonus to him. He bought it because he made a stupid 420 joke that had legal ramifications (and not for the first time). He tried to back out of buying it but it was too late.

        • Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works
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          9 months ago

          I thought it was just a way to sell a shitload of Tesla shares while the market was high, without it making it look like he wanted to sell TSLA. But then he got caught by the tail, and now he is just making what he thinks is best out of the situation. When life gives you Twitter, make it X? Idk.

    • Joe@discuss.tchncs.de
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      9 months ago

      Oh I don’t know… twitter was probably seen as good tool for more pump & dump and other financial scams, not to mention the opportunity to influence worldwide politics.

      Then there’s the wish to turn it into an everything app with micro transactions at every step of the way. Such a beast wouldn’t get far in the EU, and probably not the US either.