Can Anyone Trust X Usage Numbers? Should They? Probably Not

Lots of things have happened since Phony Stark bought Twitter, took it private, changed its name, chased away advertisers, and, apparently, lost his mind. One of the more significant developments, at least as it interests the advertisers X still has, is the fact that Xitter has become something of a black box in terms of publicly available data about usage of the platform. And what data X actually does release looks shady as hell.

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.”

Yeah, that’s bullshit.

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.

….

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.

X gives different numbers to different stakeholders all the time and none of them ever add up.