Hi folks, senior tech reporter Kylie Robison here. As promised, I’m back with more X news.
Yesterday, X owner Elon Musk posted that the platform “is seeing incredible usage growth,” with a graph listing an unusual metric for a platform: total seconds. Globally, the 7-day average was 360.7 billion—with a B—seconds spent on the platform. CEO Linda Yaccarino chimed in with the somewhat confusing rejoinder that “no wonder new users are becoming heavy users 3 times faster than before.” What? Anyways.
I do believe there are still many heavy users of X, much for the same reason I don’t think competitors will steal too much of its user base—people love to rubberneck. Musk does something crazy, people flock to see and complain about it, and then he gets to tweet about active users reaching a new record high.
But why measure engagement in seconds? Musk claims that cumulative user seconds, specifically via Android and iOS, is the “hardest to game.” A source at the firm said this to me, too.
“It’s more exact, it does keep bots out of the equation,” the source told Fortune. “If you use MAU or DAU as long as a bot is logged in it’ll be counted.”
As a horribly active user of the platform, I’ve noticed that bots haven’t really gone away. In fact, Musk’s early declarations of war on bots seemed to have actually worsened the problem, attracting bots to the platform like moths to a flame. With major advertisers fleeing, the platform appears to rely on anyone with a credit card to buy ad space. Now, we have a whole lot of advertisements from users who have no posts, often with blue verified checks, and are selling everything from fake luxury goods to seemingly fake Keto Drops endorsed by Shark Tank.
If you recall, I wrote a whole Data Sheet about this problem. I even spoke to one of the owners of these spam accounts, who told me “these blue checks accounts are hacked,” hence making it easier to reliably spam the platform. That same spammer told me he makes $100k a year hocking Ethereum scams on X.
Bleeping Computer noticed this too, reporting this week about a growing trend where hackers are focusing their efforts on verified accounts linked to government and business profiles. These accounts typically feature 'gold' and 'grey' checkmarks, and are being exploited to promote cryptocurrency scams, phishing sites, and platforms with crypto drainers.
So, sure, maybe bots aren’t easily counted in the user seconds (despite them filling the platform regularly). The odd metric, though, seems to be purposefully vague. It’s hard to compare it to social media competitors, like Instagram or TikTok because no one uses it. There are also a lot of variables missing, as some Reddit users point out. For example, is the metric cumulative across all users? And how are they measured? Of course, the 7-day average over the holidays might also give the numbers a boost, since many were off work for the holidays and on their phones, one Community Note on Musk’s post explained. What’s more is that user seconds narrows it down to hardcore users, which is much of what’s left of X, so average engagement in seconds will increase. Axios reported a lot of data that showed X usage plummeting in 2023. A source at the firm said usage remained “mostly flat” last year.
Look, there’s a lot of ways to slice what’s going on at X. What the team is working on there, specifically the work on live streaming, is a good step in the right direction. If X can compete with TikTok, YouTube, and others on revenue sharing, that’d be incredible. However, they still need real advertisers and real users on the platform. Musk gets in the way of that growth quite frequently, thanks to anti-Semitic remarks and his general antics. What’s clear is that the skeleton crew at X is working hard to crank out cool features (as anyone who remembers the glacial pace of innovation at the old Twitter will attest), and sometimes they get kneecapped by Musk in a bad mood. I’m not sure X will explode in popularity this year without a lot of reflection at the C-suite level, but as an internet poster, I do hope for the best. Where else can I post about biblically accurate hackers?
With that, here are more of today's top tech stories.
Kylie Robison
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Today’s edition was curated by Rachyl Jones.
