In April this year, five days before offering to buy the social media platform, billionaire Elon Musk mused: “Is Twitter dying?” According to the source, the fact is far from being a celebrity fading away. Internal research data shows that Twitter’s heavy users are losing a lot, which may be the biggest challenge facing Musk as he completes a $44 billion acquisition proposal.
Heavy users have been declining since the pandemic, Twitter researchers said in an internal document titled “Where Are Twitter Users?” According to reports, “heavy Twitter users” account for less than 10% of overall monthly users, but they generate 90% of tweets and half of the global revenue.
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The document mentions that “heavy Twitter users” are defined as those who log in 6-7 days a week and send 3-4 tweets per week. In addition, the survey also shows that Twitter’s English-language platform continues to lose its appeal to advertisers.
The study also found a shift in the interests of Twitter’s most active English-speaking users over the past two years, which could make the platform less attractive to advertisers.
The report noted that cryptocurrencies and NSFW content were the topics of greatest interest to English-speaking heavy users. At the same time, these users’ interest in news, sports, and entertainment is waning.
Twitter declined to say how many tweets were posted in English or how much money it made from English-speaking users, but analysts said those users were important to Twitter’s business.
Jasmine Enberg, an analyst at Insider Intelligence, said the platform earned more ad revenue from the U.S. alone in the fourth quarter than all other markets combined, and most ads in the U.S. are likely to target English-speaking users.
The “disturbing” trend of Twitter’s decline in heavy users may have been overshadowed by an overall increase in daily active users, and was classified as a drop in the company’s most active users, the research report said. The study didn’t make specific conclusions about why the platform’s heavy users are declining.
When asked to comment on the findings of internal documents on Monday, a Twitter spokesperson said: “We regularly conduct research on a wide variety of trends that evolve based on what’s happening in the world. Our overall user base continues to grow, reaching 238 million mDAU in the second quarter of 2022.”
Moreover, statistics from the US website Punks & Pinstripes show that in the past 90 days, more than 500 people have been involved in court battles over the acquisition between the company and Tesla CEO Elon Musk. The employee left Twitter. And these people are becoming the target of technology giants such as Google, Apple, Amazon, and Meta, which to some extent deepens the predicament that Twitter is facing.
