Axios Reports Nearly All Of Twitter's Key Metrics (Except Visits To Elon Musk's Profile) Have Tanked In The Past Year

Over the past year, there have been plenty of tweets suggesting Twitter, now rebranded to "X," has gotten significantly worse since Elon Musk purchased the app late last year.

As the site nears the one-year anniversary of Musk beginning his tumultuous tenure at the helm, raw data is reportedly confirming the feeling many on Twitter have expressed: Twitter is driving users away.

A report from Axios published today analyzes the data of Twitter's userbase over the past year, and the results are not great for the app Elon Musk has attempted to rebrand into an "everything app."

According to Axios' findings, downloads of "X" are down 38 percent globally and 57 percent in the U.S. in the last year. Usage is down 14 percent and 17 percent. Web traffic is down 7 percent and 11 percent. The percentage of users who stopped using the app is up 30 percent. Ad business is down 60 percent, according to Musk himself. Estimates for Twitter's ad revenue for 2023 are $2.9 billion, down from $4.14 billion in 2022.

It appears this is not an industry-wide trend either, as several of X's competitors have seen increases in users, according to research firm Sensor Tower.

The troubling numbers could be the result of the many controversial changes Musk has brought to Twitter, including but not limited to: doing away with free verification, leading to brand impersonation, which scared off major advertisers; signaling that the historically free-to-use app will become a paid service in order to combat "bots"; hiding headlines from news links, causing the potential for misinformation; threatening to remove the blocking feature.

On the bright side for Musk, impressions on his personal profile are up 96 percent. However, this also may be due to changes he introduced — in February, during the Super Bowl, Musk was reportedly incensed that Joe Biden's tweet about the game got more impressions than his own and had an employee change the algorithm to juice his tweets in the wee hours of the morning.