The numbers are looking abysmal.
Down the Drain
In his gambit to take over Twitter and turn it into the “everything app” of his dreams, owner Elon Musk is really struggling to stop the platform from hemorrhaging users.
As Axios reports, downloads of X, the social network formerly known as Twitter, have veritably plummeted in 2023, marking Musk’s first year of ownership less as a tumultuous journey and more as a rapidly sinking ship.
Insights from multiple social media analytics firms paint a worrying picture of the future of X, with monthly downloads being down 38 percent globally and 57 percent in the US between October 2022 and October 2023, per estimates from the digital intelligence company Sensor Tower reviewed by Axios.
When visualized in a simple line chart, courtesy of Axios, that downward trend is downright jarring to behold, with worldwide app downloads sinking from around 16 million to just 10 million since around May.
Flames Go Higher
To be fair, it’s not like the site’s not-so-new owner has exactly helped things along. The Twitter of today is nearly unrecognizable from what it was a year ago, with Musk changing its name to X, or giving everybody who’s willing to pay for a subscription a blue verification checkmark. News that he’s considering putting tweets behind a paywall likely hasn’t done much to inspire user retention, either.
Downloads aren’t the only falling metrics, either. As the social media analytics firm Similarweb found in its recent report, X-formerly-Twitter is down bad in every way possible, from monthly active usage falling 14.8 percent globally and 17.8 percent in the US to web traffic falling over the last year as well.
The news comes amid the Wall Street Journal‘s reporting that banks are expected to take a 15 percent loss when selling the debt they accrued via Musk’s $44 billion gamble. People familiar with the matter told the WSJ that the seven banks, which lent Musk $13 billion to finance his acquisition, are looking at a roughly $2 billion total loss.
In official parlance, it looks like Twitter – OK, fine, X — is in deep doo-doo, and it’s unclear how the ship can be steered away from its impending iceberg of collapse.
Unless, of course, this was all part of Musk’s plan all along, as some have suggested.
More on Twitter: Elon Musk Says He Has No Intention of Pulling Out
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