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Elon Musk bought Twitter in the hopes of making it more popular than ever, but traffic to the social media platform has instead decreased during his tenure.
The estimate comes from Similarweb, a data and analytics company, which released numbers today showing interest in Twitter has waned since Musk’s takeover. “In September, global web traffic to twitter.com was down -14%, year-over-year, and traffic to the ads.twitter.com portal for advertisers was down -16.5%,” Similarweb says.
(Credit: Similarweb)In the US, traffic was down even further, declining by 19% year-over-year. “Performance on mobile was no better, down -17.8% year-over-year based on combined monthly active users for iOS and Android in the US,” the company adds.
That said, the decline isn’t a plunge. Similarweb notes traffic to Twitter has occasionally increased during the past year. “But the overall trend is downward,” the company says.
(Credit: Similarweb)The report isn’t a great sign for Musk, considering he paid $44 billion to buy the company. He’s since introduced numerous controversial changes to the platform, including rebranding it as X. “But nothing Musk has done seems to have translated into lasting improvements to compete better against the social networks that are continuing to grow strongly, such as TikTok, for which global web traffic was up 22.8% in September,” Similarweb says.
The only positive metric Similarweb could find is that traffic to Elon Musk’s own personal Twitter account and posts is up 96% year-over-year.
Twitter/X didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. But the company itself seems to have conceded that Twitter’s monetizable daily users have decreased, falling from 254 million back in November down to 245 million. In addition, Musk himself admitted that US-based ad revenue for X has fallen by as much as 60%.
Still, Musk has also claimed that X recently achieved a “new high” when counting monthly active users, reaching 541 million in June. The monthly active user count has since hit 550 million, according to remarks Musk made a month ago.