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”).
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”).