So is X seeing more or less usage, especially in the wake of the U.S. election?
Because the reports are widely conflicted. Based on third-party insights, X is losing millions of users every week, while alternative platforms like Threads and Bluesky continue to gain traction.
Yet, X itself, which is the only source of truly accurate X usage info, continues to report record usage, with its latest update being that “active user seconds,” its preferred performance metric, reached a record high in 2024.
As you can see, X claims that total active user seconds, per day, are up 10% year-over-year, while video views are also booming in the app.
So which is it? Is X stretching the truth with its data, or are the third-party analytics providers, which don’t have access to X’s full data set, getting the numbers wrong?
First off, let’s look at X’s data. The 364 billion total active user seconds per day equates to 24 minutes per user, per day, based on X having a reported 250 million daily actives.
That’s clearly a lot, but it’s not as much as X claimed back in March, when it said that users are spending 30 minutes per day in the app on average.
So it’s difficult to see how this could be a “record.”
X also claimed in March that it was seeing 8 billion cumulative active user minutes per day, on average, which would equate to 417 billion seconds.
Now, X could have been seeing more usage earlier in the year, which has eased back since, and settled into the above-noted 364 billion total seconds on average. But either way, based on these data notes, it’s likely that X is now seeing less usage than it had been.
Also, 24 minutes per user, per day is less than the 38 minutes per day that users were reportedly spending on Twitter a few years back, so again, it’s hard to see how this could be a “record,” even accounting for variances in how Twitter calculated active minutes versus how X is measuring active seconds (Twitter reportedly counted any part of a minute as an active minute, so even using the app for an extra second within a new minute would be rounded up).
But it could be a record since X itself has been recording active user seconds as a stat for a while. So maybe, this is a year-over-year record, though I’m not even sure that would be accurate, based on the above reporting.
Using X’s own data, it does seem like X is seeing less usage over time, not more, yet it’s reframing this as a win.
Which is on theme for X, which regularly reports misleading or cherry-picked data points. But it is worth also noting that while X is likely seeing less usage than it had been, it is still seeing a lot of activity, more than many of the reports that have been touting the platform’s demise suggest.
And maybe, in the wake of Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential election, X could see a resurgence, as more people question whether the platform’s shift to a more right-wing aligned perspective is as negative a move as initially suspected.
With half of American voters supporting Trump, many brands will now be questioning whether they should head back to X in order to reach a wider audience, and that could make it a more acceptable and influential app once again.
But is X seeing record high usage?
Look, I suspect not, and that’s going on X’s own reporting, and there are definitely questions about its varying data points in this respect.
And again, with reports also suggesting that millions of people are leaving the app (which is also at least partially supported by X’s own reporting), it does seem like X is declining to some degree.
But again, likely not as much as you would expect.
Andrew Hutchinson
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