Elon Musk will have a lot more abandoned Twitter usernames to hand out in the coming years, a new research note from Insider Intelligence predicts.
This forecast released Tuesday sees Musk’s erratic stewardship of his $44 billion purchase inciting “an exodus of users next year and beyond,” with 32.7 million of Twitter’s estimated 368.4 million monthly active users worldwide logging off by 2024—almost 9% of the total.
“This is the first time we’ve predicted a drop in worldwide Twitter users since we began tracking the company in 2008,” Insider’s report comments in boldface type.
The New York market-research firm is more pessimistic about the US, forecasting that 8.2 million of 58.7 million estimated monthly active users will quit—a dropout rate of almost 14%.
“There won’t be one catastrophic event that ends Twitter,” the report quotes Jasmine Enberg, principal analyst at Insider Intelligence. “Instead, users will start to leave the platform next year as they grow frustrated with technical issues and the proliferation of hateful or other unsavory content. Twitter’s skeleton staff, working around the clock, won’t be able to counteract the platform’s infrastructure and content moderation problems.”
Since taking over Twitter on Oct. 28, Musk has fired most of Twitter’s employees, scrapped much of the old content-moderation regime, issued an “amnesty” that has restored the previously banned accounts of anti-vaxxers and neo-Nazis as hate speech has surged. He also accused previous management of ignoring child sexual-abuse material, calling Twitter “both a social media company and a crime scene” in a tweet Saturday.
Some high-profile advertisers have been backing away, although Musk hopes to offset that with subscription revenue from the just-relaunched Twitter Blue option ($8/month on the web, $11 through its iOS app). Insider itself isn’t too bearish on ad sales, sticking to its early-November forecast that they would stay flat through 2024.
That may be too kind. The New York Times reported Dec. 2 that Twitter had slashed its own fourth-quarter ad revenue projections from $1.4 billion to $1.1 billion. Sunday, the Wall Street Journal reported that ad traffic on Twitter, as measured by the firm Similarweb, had plunged to record lows in early December—”traffic volume now so low it doesn’t even meet the firm’s threshold necessary to track and measure it.”