Is X Usage Actually Rising? A Look at Its Latest Stats

Honestly, if X wants to reinforce advertiser trust, it really needs to get its facts straight.

Today, in a post about X’s decision to take legal action against the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) over an alleged conspiracy to stop advertisers running campaigns in the app, X CEO Linda Yaccarino claimed that:

“Even despite the [advertiser] boycott, usage has reached all time highs. Using a Twitter legacy metric, user active minutes, in August 2022, people spent 7.2 billion active minutes on the platform. Today, that number is more than 9 billion, a 25% increase.”

The metric that Yaccarino is referring to is based on this data, presented by Elon Musk as part of his early pitch deck for what Twitter would become.

As you can see in this chart, in November 2022, when Musk presented this info, Twitter/X had reached a new high of 8 billion user minutes per day, which aligns with Yaccarino’s statement.

But that’s not what X has reported at other times.

Last month, X reported that the platform facilitated 361.9 billion user seconds per day, on average, in Q2.

361.9 billion seconds equates to 6.03 billion minutes per day, which is 3 billion fewer minutes than Yaccarino has today claimed.

Though there could be some explanation for this.

As a former Twitter employee recently explained to social media expert Matt Navarra, the calculations for active seconds and minutes that Twitter had used in the past are very different, with Twitter counting any seconds within a minute as, effectively, a full minute.

"So a user could be on X for 5 seconds and it would be classed as [an active minute] because they were active during that minute."

If that’s still the case at X, that would mean that active user seconds is a significantly more accurate measure, as X has claimed. But could it also mean that there’s potentially a discrepancy of 30% between the two stats?

And also, what does that then mean in terms of actual X usage?

Well, according to X’s active user seconds count, as posted last month, the platform’s 250 million daily active users are currently spending 24.13 minutes per day, on average, using the app.

Back in March, X claimed that this was actually 30 minutes per day per user.

So maybe, for this one, they were using the same active minutes calculation. For context, 9 billion minutes per day, which Yaccarino says is the current usage, would equate to 36 minutes per user/per day. 

But essentially, somehow, X has ended up sharing a range of varying usage stats, based on different calculations and methodologies, which only serves to confuse its actual usage insight and raise questions about its figures.

So, based on all of this, is X usage actually growing over time?

Well, not in terms of daily active users, and seemingly not in terms of time spent in the app. Unless you’re calculating based on active user minutes. Which X is, but it also isn’t.

I don’t know, but it seems like X is currently being used by 250 million people per day, and that they’re each using it for 24 minutes on average. And considering that X’s daily active user count isn’t rising, if the active seconds count does go up, it means that the people who are currently using X are using it more often.  

Which makes sense, and those are fine stats, so I’m not sure why X keeps clouding them with these other metrics. But again, the mismatching of data points is likely not helping it to gain more advertiser trust.