• Elon Musk revealed on Friday that Twitter had half a billion users.
• However, the graph showcasing this achievement doesn’t feature labels of any kind.
• The billionaire is currently in the process of rebranding the iconic internet company to X.

Since the sink was let in, the talk of Twitter’s demise has been one that many pundits have penned opinion pieces on, largely based on numbers seen from external sources.

As Twitter, or X, is now a private company, insight into its performance is at the discretion of its owner, Elon Musk and until now, things haven’t been well lit. On Friday however, Musk gave us a rare look into how many users the platform has since he’s taken over.

The end of the chart is for 27th July and according to Musk the chart showcases user growth but doesn’t say from when that growth is measured from.

The last look we had at Twitter’s results was in Q2 2022 and the firm reported that it had 237.8 million monetisable daily active users. If Musk’s numbers are highlighting that same metric, then he is doing rather well, except he likely isn’t using that metric given the labels for the X and Y axis are conveniently cropped out of the image.

The metric Musk seems to have been drawn to is cumulative user-seconds which he says is how Android and iOS report user engagement in applications.

We also have to point out that earlier this month Musk said that Twitter was cash-flow negative and there had been a 50 percent drop in advertising revenue. As Musk has now shown that users are flocking to the platform, that decrease in advertising falling could be chalked up to fewer advertisers being on the platform.

Looking at Similarweb, it reports that Twitter had 6.5 billion visits in July 2023, this is a combination of mobile and desktop traffic and isn’t a count of users, just how many visits there were over the month.

All tolled, Twitter is the 5th most visited website in the world but it pales in comparison to Facebook which attracts 16.8 billion visits per Similarweb. Last week Meta revealed that Facebook now attracts 3 billion people every month meaning over a third of the global population is logging into Facebook at least once a month.

That is an inordinate amount of growth for the Meta brand and showcases just how powerful a platform Facebook is globally.

Meanwhile, Twitter is undergoing a rebrand that even Musk’s most ardent supporters are against. The owner says that he wants to turn Twitter into his “everything app” X, and while he has lofty ambitions, whether there are folks who are still willing to stick around to see how it performs remains to be seen.

At the weekend Twitter finally launched Advertising Revenue Sharing for Twitter Blue subscribers. Here folks can earn revenue from advertising that appears in their replies. Only views from Twitter Blue users will count towards advertising revenue sharing and in order to qualify for the benefit one must have at least 500 followers and 15 million impressions across all posts with the last three months. That’s a tall order especially when you consider YouTube’s Partner Programme requires 1 000 subscribers and 4 000 valid public watch hours over the last 12 months.

With that having been said, advertisers are currently dealing with a rather combative environment with the latest controversy being that verified brands who don’t pay for verification would need to spend at least $1 000 in advertising to keep their checkmark.

If the graph above is accurate, it’s taken Musk a rather short amount of time to nearly double Twitter’s users, especially given the dip we see right at the start. We’re not calling it a comeback though, the rebrand to X still needs to be completed and we suspect that many folks may simply stop using the website once that happens.