Traffic to Elon Musk's personal profile and posts is significantly up
The site formerly known as Twitter is not, in fact, growing under new owner Elon Musk, according to web and mobile analytics firm Similarweb. Rather, X is shrinking, with global web traffic down 14% year-over-year in September and global mobile app usage down 17.8% in the U.S. and down 14.8% globally on Android.
One thing is growing massively, however: traffic to Elon Musk’s personal profile and posts.
“On the plus side, traffic to Elon Musk’s profile and posts was up 96% year-over-year in September,” the company said in a blog post.
Metrics that are not growing, however, include:
- Global web traffic to Twitter: down 14%
- Global traffic to Twitter’s advertising portal: down 16.5%
- Australia traffic: down 17.5%
- German traffic: down 17.9%
This contrasts with messaging from Musk and X CEO Linda Yaccarino that the property is growing. In July, for instance, Yaccarino told staffers in a memo that “our usage is at an all time high.” On July 28, Elon Musk tweeted that “X monthly users reach new high in 2023.” That doesn’t easily accord with SimilarWeb’s data, which shows slight increases in iOS and Android app users in June, but an overall downward trend through 2023. For web visits, SimilarWeb shows the same general drop over the past year, with some spikes in March and May failing to restore an overall upward trend.
Desktop and mobile web visits to Twitter are down in 2023
It’s important to note that in statistics it’s fairly easy to cherry-pick data to tell stories that, strictly speaking, aren’t accurate.
For instance, overall users could be down while usage is up if the remaining users are more active on the service. Or monthly average sessions could be up while daily average sessions are down if formerly passionate users frequent a platform less often, while some new users also join. In that scenario, overall the property would have a downward trend in usage, but an executive could report the one positive monthly statistic.
Some other social networks are seeing downtrends as well, Similarweb says. The top 100 social networks are down 3.7% as a whole, and Facebook is down 10%. But others are growing, like TikTok, up 23%, and Pinterest, up about 8%.
The total decline since September of 2022 means that X has received 955 million fewer visits over the course of a year, something that won’t be good for a platform that receives most of its income from advertising.
There are some positives, however.
Twitter so far remains a top three social network globally for website and mobile use, trailing just Facebook and Instagram, and beating Reddit, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Tumblr. But particularly in the U.S., usage trails platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat and Pinterest.
Similarweb bases its numbers on a blend of digital signals, the company says. That includes “millions of websites and apps” that share analytics with the company, plus “a collection of consumer products” that share anonymous traffic data. The company says it also has partnerships with a global network of organizations that collect intelligence on digital traffic, and it captures and indexes publicly available data by spidering millions of websites — just like Google and other search engines — and running apps, presumably in an emulated mobile device on a server.
Its data is indicative of what is actually happened, but will not be as accurate as a company’s own internal data.
