It was another big weekend for X, with the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump driving more conversation in the app.
Though the specifics, as always, do require some scrutiny.
Today, X owner Elon Musk has claimed that the platform reached a new “record high” in usage.
???? usage hit another all-time high yesterday with 417 billion user-seconds globally!
In the US, user-seconds reached 93B, 23% higher than the previous record of 76B.
In a single day.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 15, 2024
Breaking that down, Musk says that X saw a cumulative “417 billion user-seconds globally” in one day, which equates to 27.8 minutes per user, at 250 million daily actives.
Which is a lot, but it’s not as much as X claimed back in March, when it said that users are spending 30 minutes per day in the app on average.
So it’s either not a record, or X made a mistake in its reporting earlier in the year.
Which I suspect is the case, because 417 billion seconds also comes out to 6.95 billion minutes, well below the 8b that X also claimed in March.
Musk’s claim of 93 billion user seconds in the U.S. alone also equates to 15.5 minutes per user, on average, assuming 100 million U.S. users (which X has previously claimed). Which is not particularly high per-person usage, and on balance, looking at the numbers, really, it’s hard to measure what either of these data points actually mean, as we don’t have enough qualifying info to measure how cumulative user seconds applies to reach and resonance among X users.
The only assumption we can make is that X is reaching fewer people, which is why it’s switched to reporting cumulative seconds instead. Yet, at the same time, X is a valuable utility for real-time breaking news events, particularly given Meta’s aversion to the same for its Twitter-like Threads app.
So X is no doubt seeing good performance, and it should be touting its usage during events like this. Yet, its own data is confusing and convoluted, and it seemingly contradicts itself so often that it’s hard to know what any of its usage numbers actually mean.
From a marketing perspective, advertisers want to know how many people they can reach, how long people are engaged, and what elements they’re engaging with. Based on this, they can then make an informed choice about how they can reach people in the app, but I’m not sure that X’s data provides this insight.
Instead, it seems like a continued attempt to obscure usage declines, whether they’re happening or not, because it can’t make up its mind about its own performance figures.
If X wants to be transparent, as Musk says, it should publish full usage data, including users, and allow broader scrutiny of its performance.
