Twitter claims that its user growth is hitting record highs—in spite of its chaotic transition.
Key Details
- Elon Musk officially purchased Twitter on October 29.
- Since then, a large portion of the staff has been fired and he is promising major internal reform for the company, although it is requesting some of the fired employees to come back.
- The company has made several controversial decisions like charging monthly fees for Blue Checkmarks.
- Despite this, Twitter internally claims that its monetizable daily user has grown to 20% since the takeover, The Verge reports.
- The company has seen a major drop in revenue though due to Musk’s chaotic approach and a significant rise in hateful content on the platform.
- Musk blamed the revenue drop on “activist groups pressuring advertisers” and mass trolling campaigns of users spamming racial slurs and other hateful content. Twitter also says that controversial content is negligible, within the range of 0.25% to 0.45% of all Twitter content.
Why it’s News
The chaotic transition caused by Musk’s takeover has left Twitter in a vulnerable position, with many criticizing or praising his major decisions. It has been good for the app’s user numbers but is starting to affect revenue.
Dozens of high-profile brands have paused or pulled Twitter advertising in the past week in response to the chaos—including General Motors, United Airlines, and Pfizer.
“Downloads of Twitter’s app have grown steadily in the first week since Elon Musk became the company’s owner, but other apps—particularly Mastodon, a distributed open-source service—are starting to gain traction, too, as users begin to experiment with alternatives,” says Axios.
Mastodon has nearly eclipsed Twitter in terms of new downloads in the past two weeks, increasing from 3,400 downloads to 113,400 in that time. It now has more than one million active users.
“Daily downloads of Mastodon, a social media app that works something like Twitter but with a chronological feed and no central server, have exploded since Musk took over Twitter, according to new data from Apptopia,” says Axios.
