A few days before Elon Musk announced his intention to buy Twitter, he publicly wondered if the social network was dying, citing the reduced activity of Twitter accounts with the largest number of followers as an example. Now, days before the deadline expires to close the deal of 44,000 million dollars for which he will definitively buy the company, an internal twitter investigation on the status of the platform (entitled ‘Where have the tweeters gone?’ and broadcast by the Reuters agency) seems to reply that…
…Yes: Twitter is dead. And the key lies in who are stopping talking using Twitter and in what conversations they are being replaced.
The report contemplates a category called ‘heavy users’ (‘weight tweeters’, could be translated) defined as logging in 6-7 days a week and tweeting at least 3-4 times a week. Well, these users they represent less than 10% of platform users, but generate 90% of all tweets…and they are the basis of 50% of Twitter’s revenue.
And it is precisely this profile that would have been in “absolute decline” from the start of the pandemic until now. And no, the document does not reach specific conclusions that explain this trend, although they do point to Instagram and TikTok as a possible destination for the ‘exiles’.
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“Disturbing Trends”
But things get worse for Twitter, because the change in the most frequent conversations caused by these users fleeing the ship is making the social network less and less attractive to advertisers. For English-speaking users, what has remained after the departure of the heavy users are the conversations about cryptocurrencies and the content ‘NSFW’ (stands for ‘unsafe for the workplace’: fundamentally pornographywe go).
Twitter is one of the few major social networks that allows you to post nudity content. This kind of content constitutes 13% of what is published on the platform, according to the company itself. In September, several brands suspended their ad campaigns over what they perceived to be an increase in child pornography accounts On twitter.
These “disturbing trends” (report terminology), coupled with declining interest in breaking news, sports and entertainment, are doing little to shore up the image that Twitter projected as the world’s ‘public square’.
“The great communities are now in decline […] There appears to be a significant discrepancy between what you might imagine our company values to be and our growth patterns.”
“But that’s just English-speaking users,” we might think, “not that relevant.” Except that, according to the latest data revealed by Twitter to its investors, the social network has been obtaining more advertising revenue in the United States than in all other markets combined.