Elon Musk Claims X Reached New Usage High After Presidential Debate

Okay, we have to break this down a little bit:

Over the weekend, in the wake of the first Presidential debate in the U.S., X owner Elon Musk shared this stat, in which he claims that the platform reached an “all time high” in usage.

But all the third party reports suggest that X usage is declining, that X is losing relevance, and attention, and that Musk’s social media experiment hasn’t, thus far, seen much success.

So which is true, is X reaching new all-time highs, or is Elon just making up new metrics, then pitching them as success points?

Well, it’s difficult to say without all of the data available.

First off, looking at the metrics provided. Elon claims that X saw 76 billion total user seconds in the U.S.

There’s no time frame for this, but presumably, that 76 billion seconds is in one day. That would equate to over 21 million hours of cumulative time spent in the app, which is obviously a heap of attention. But breaking that down by total U.S. users (100m), that equates to 12.6 minutes per user in the U.S.

Which is not great, considering that X reported back in March that users are spending 30 minutes per day on X, on average.

Which is why further qualification of these numbers is important, because I actually suspect that X doesn’t have 100 million daily actives in the U.S., and that this could be a monthly usage figure. Yet, even if you were to take that down to 50 million daily actives in the U.S., that still only comes out to 25 minutes per day, per U.S. user, based on these metrics.

Which is far less impressive a number than 76 billion user seconds.

Which is likely why Musk and Co. are trying to shift the focus to the larger number, though that’s more misleading, because it doesn’t account for actual reach. What advertisers want to know is how many people they can get their promotions in front of in the app, and in this sense, cumulative seconds is actually a pretty useless metric.

But Elon says that user seconds is “the hardest to game”, thereby making it the best indicator of actual human engagement. I’m not sure that that’s true either, but that’s what X is going with, so these are the stats that they they’re sharing.

And according to X, despite the breakdown to minutes per user, it’s now reached a new high on this front

But is that for Twitter and X all time, or just X? If it’s just X, then that’s, what, a year of data?

I don’t know, it’s all very speculative, and because it’s not a directly comparable figure to what other platforms report, it doesn’t really mean anything. Unless you’re within X, and you want to celebrate a new milestone of some kind.

So is Musk’s claim accurate? Well, if it is, then it would suggest that X’s usage, in general, has been down, because those user seconds figures, when analyzed, aren’t really that impressive.

The bottom line, however, is that if your audience is there, it may have value as an ad platform. The expanded considerations from that are down to your own personal perspective.