X’s Advertising Business Continues to Tank ⇥ techdirt.com

Sarah Perez, in a TechCrunch story about monthly active user numbers for Bluesky, Threads, and X, using data provided by Similarweb:

Instead, the data shows that X’s worldwide monthly active users on mobile were down around 3% year-over-year in June, and X’s mobile daily active users dropped 7% in July to 123.7 million. (Of course, X remains a sizable social network with around 302 million monthly active users on its app as of June 2026 and a growing number of web visits, up 5.3% year-over-year in July to 4.7 billion.)

Similarweb’s data is janky as hell, and this number is a long, long way from SpaceX’s self-reported monthly active user count of 550 million on X alone. I am not saying either number is reliable, only that a gulf of 248 million users is an error not easily explained by rounding or estimation assumptions. Pre-takeover, Twitter had about 338 million monthly active users, according to an estimate by Insider Intelligence; in four years, the platform either declined by around 36 million monthly users or grew by over 200 million.

By the way, how is X doing from a financial perspective?

Mike Masnick, Techdirt:

Let’s break all this down: In the second quarter of 2022, the last full quarter before Elon took over, Twitter brought in $1.08 billion in ad revenue. In the second quarter of 2026, X brought in $367 million. That’s $713 million a quarter, gone. Elon has wiped out two-thirds of Twitter’s ad business over the exact period in which he promised investors he’d nearly triple it.

Musk said in his 2022 Twitter investor pitch that he would quintuple revenue by 2028, though advertising would represent just 45% of that for a total of $12 billion annually. But, then again, Musk says a lot of things that are not true, like how his heart goes out to you.