Last year in October, Elon Musk made a power move with his $44 billion acquisition of social media platform Twitter. He went on to make major modifications to the company such as laying off thousands of its original staff, charging its users to obtain the prestigious blue check mark on their profiles, firing much of the team responsible for monitoring misinformation, reinstating banned user accounts and burying the name Twitter, only to rename the platform X.
The company has since touted its success after Musk’s acquisition. A month after he took over last year, Musk tweeted a company presentation that showed off an average of 2 million new user sign-ups daily for the platform throughout the week of Nov. 16, 2022, claiming that it broke a record-high for the company.
Also, this summer in July, X CEO Linda Yaccarino applauded the company’s success in a company memo obtained by CNBC claiming that the social media platform’s usage was at an “all time high.”
But now, it seems that X’s usage hasn’t been all of what it's been hyped up to be.
New data from Similarweb, a company that specializes in web analytics, shows that X’s web traffic was down 14% in September, year-over-year, despite small month-to-month increases.
Related: Threads threatens X with upcoming competitive feature
The report mentions that the declining web traffic in September aligns with longer-term trends. During the first nine months of this year, the platform’s web traffic declined 11.6% year-over-year in the U.S. and 7% globally, compared to the same period in 2022.
Apparently, users are also abandoning X on their phones, according to the report. Mobile performance was down by 17.8% year-over-year based on monthly active users for iOS and Android combined in the U.S, which is a larger decline compared to the app’s competitors such as Instagram, which faced a 3.7% decrease and Facebook, which declined 8%.
Musk has envisioned X becoming an “everything app,” promising big changes and upcoming additional features to the platform in the future. But the decline in the platform’s usage shows that its transformation into an “everything app” may be off-putting for some users.
In a Pew Research Center survey released earlier this year, 60% of U.S. adults who had used X in the past year said they’d taken a break from the platform five months after Musk purchased it. The survey also found that a quarter of X users said it is unlikely they will be present on the site a year later.
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