You can’t say that Elon Musk doesn’t make noise. His tendency to post (but until
The latest in chronological order (we wrote about it in an article in the last few hours) is the idea, actually already being tested in the Philippines and New Zealand, of making X payable. It will only be a symbolic sum (one dollar a year) to stem the problem of bots, i.e. fake accounts.
But beyond Musk’s pyrotechnic universe, always on the border between true and false, there is the harsh reality. Which translates, for example, into the investigation that the EU opened against the company, due to the proliferation of fake news on the conflict between Israel and Hamas. Or in the fine imposed on
And now the merciless report from SimilarWeb has arrived.
SimilarWeb’s report: traffic on X since Musk’s arrival
The title of the report which appeared on the official SimilarWeb website on Tuesday 17 October leaves no stone unturned: “One Year Into Musk’s Ownership, X (Twitter) Down By Every Measure.” Translated as: “One year of Musk ownership, X (Twitter) declining in every way”.
SimilarWeb is an IT company based in Israel that specializes in website traffic analysis.
Recall that Musk acquired the then Twitter on October 27, 2022, and as an affable good-luck move he immediately fired four top figures. Let’s see how X’s traffic has been since then (to be precise, Twitter has been called that since July 23, 2023).
X traffic decreasing (excluding… Elon Musk’s profile)
The SimilarWeb report opens with a sarcastic consideration. If Musk bought Twitter to increase his visibility, he succeeded, because the increase in followers and traffic on his profile are significant: + 96% in almost a year of leadership.
It’s a shame, however, that this is the only parameter to which the plus sign can be compared. Overall, X traffic over the last year (September 2022 to September 2023) decreased by 14%which becomes -16.5% if we consider the traffic to the ads.twitter.com portal for advertisers.
Let’s find out some more data.
The collapse of the last month
SimilarWeb’s survey shows sharply declining data for the last month, September 2023.
In the United States, a country which alone generates about a quarter of twitter.com’s web traffic, September recorded a -19%. Similar percentages In the United Kingdom (-11.6%), in France (-13.4%), in Germany (-17.9%) and in Australia (-17.5%).
And on mobile devices the numbers are no longer comforting: -17.8% drop in one year based on combined monthly active users for iOS and Android in the United States. Globally, Android usage decreased by 14.8%.
The annual overview
The collapse in X traffic in the last month is a faithful reflection of the entire year analyzed by the report.
Comparing the first 9 months of 2023 to the same period in 2022, twitter.com traffic declined 11.6% year-over-year in the United States and 7% globally. Over the same time period, mobile app usage in the United States decreased by 12.8%.
A Pyrrhic victory, we were saying, is that traffic to Elon Musk’s profile and posts has increased by 96% in a year.
Media interest is declining
Musk’s management, and in particular his constant digs at the media, have not done X any good.
The owner of the social network has also decided to remove newspaper headlines from the news preview (now by sharing a link only an image appears). The aim would have been to prevent users from clicking elsewhere, but the effect was evidently the opposite of the desired one.
SimilarWeb’s research takes the New York Times as an example: years ago the newspaper received 3-4% of its traffic from Twitter, a percentage which has currently fallen below 1%.
The difficulty of social media
Certainly, the decline in X traffic over the last year has been particularly noticeable.
But, we read in the report, in the last year all or almost all social networks have suffered a decline, with the exception of TikTokwhose traffic in the period September 2022-September 2023 increased by as much as 22.8%.
Facebook, for example, lost 10% of its traffic, Instagram grew just 0.3% and WhatsApp, Reddit and Linkedin all grew under 1%.
In general, the traffic of the top one hundred social networks decreased in one year by -3.7%.