Elon Musk, the CEO of Twitter/X, is floating an idea that he's had before to remedy the problem of social media bots: charging people to use social media.
Twitter was never a particularly big brand. Even in just the space of social media it was an also-ran.
At its peak (and it’s nowhere near its peak now!) Twitter had ~400 million monthly active users. Reddit has ~500 million. Snapchat ~750. Telegram ~800. LinkedIn ~930 (!). Messenger and TikTok ~1 billion each. Instagram and Whatsapp ~2 each. Youtube ~2.5. And Facebook ~3 billion.
Twitter at its peak is just barely outside of rounding error territory compared to Facebook and Youtube.
And here I’ve compared Twitter against its “peers”: international social media sites. There are regional social media sites that are bigger than Twitter was at its peak. QZone is ~500 million. QQ and Weibo are ~575. Kuaishou is ~650. Douyin (Tiktok’s origin) is ~725. WeChat is 1.3 billion. These six sites are in one country only … and each of them are larger than Twitter’s highest ever count. (And note that in China Weibo is considered largely a joke. At 550 million. Larger, again I stress, than Twitter was at its peak.)
The only reason Twitter has ever been treated as anything but a loser’s game is because lazy-assed reporters found reading sound bites on Twitter was easier than doing actual reportage. As a result Twitter has had outsized visibility for its rather pathetic actual participation.
The same reporters who report on China by looking in on Weibo (the “joke”).
Is anyone else amazed that it’s lasted almost a year?
No, inertia is a thing and Twitter was one of the biggest brands on the planet when Musk bought it. If anything, he speedruns its demise.
Twitter was never a particularly big brand. Even in just the space of social media it was an also-ran.
At its peak (and it’s nowhere near its peak now!) Twitter had ~400 million monthly active users. Reddit has ~500 million. Snapchat ~750. Telegram ~800. LinkedIn ~930 (!). Messenger and TikTok ~1 billion each. Instagram and Whatsapp ~2 each. Youtube ~2.5. And Facebook ~3 billion.
Twitter at its peak is just barely outside of rounding error territory compared to Facebook and Youtube.
And here I’ve compared Twitter against its “peers”: international social media sites. There are regional social media sites that are bigger than Twitter was at its peak. QZone is ~500 million. QQ and Weibo are ~575. Kuaishou is ~650. Douyin (Tiktok’s origin) is ~725. WeChat is 1.3 billion. These six sites are in one country only … and each of them are larger than Twitter’s highest ever count. (And note that in China Weibo is considered largely a joke. At 550 million. Larger, again I stress, than Twitter was at its peak.)
The only reason Twitter has ever been treated as anything but a loser’s game is because lazy-assed reporters found reading sound bites on Twitter was easier than doing actual reportage. As a result Twitter has had outsized visibility for its rather pathetic actual participation.
The same reporters who report on China by looking in on Weibo (the “joke”).