Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

April 17: although Musk claims that Twitter is close to breaking even, the data show that Twitter seems to be accelerating its demise. According to market intelligence statistics, traffic on the social media platform fell 7.7% in March from a year earlier, web page visits fell 3.3%, and daily active users of Android decreased by 9.8%.

It has been a year since Elon Musk (Elon Musk) began to buy Twitter shares on a large scale, and the six months since he actually took over Twitter can only be described as chaos. In early April, Musk quietly merged a new shell company called X on Twitter. In other words, Twitter no longer exists.

In a recent interview, Musk painted a bright future for Twitter. Twitter is booming with "record usage", he said, and despite "occasional server outages", the "site is doing very well". Most of the advertisers who initially fled the platform after he took over have returned, and the company is even expected to turn a profit next quarter. Mr Musk also scoffed at criticism that he had destroyed Twitter, saying predictions that the platform would "cease to exist"proved wrong".

To some extent, what Musk is saying is true: Twitter did not die out overnight in a catastrophic technological collapse, as many sceptics of Musk's takeover warned. But even if Twitter is not dead, it is moving in that direction.

If you are still using Twitter today, you may find that the experience is getting worse. The number of outages and vulnerabilities in the app continues to rise, and many users complain about seeing more content they don't want to see in the new For You push. Just last week, NPR and PBS, two mainstream news media with more than 1000 million followers, stopped using the platform after Musk lost confidence in their decision-making ability after labeling the accounts as "government-funded media."

Many people on Twitter, especially Musk's loyal fans, are accepting the changes brought about by Musk. But there is no denying that Twitter is a more unreliable experience than it was before Musk took over. Mr Musk defended many of his controversial moves, saying he was fighting to defend freedom of expression by taking power from the "media elite" touting the check mark and allocating it to everyone else.

The problem is that Mr Musk's plan does not seem to be as effective as he says it is. Twitter's Internet traffic fell 7.7% last month compared with the same period last year, and has been falling over the past three months, according to the latest estimate from SimilarWeb, a data intelligence company. This contradicts Mr Musk's claim that the use of the platform has risen. In terms of advertising, Twitter's main source of revenue, external data also conflict with Musk's claim. Several reports over the past few months have shown that top brand owners have continued to leave the platform since Mr Musk took over.

The US media recently interviewed a number of Twitter employees, former employees, advertising experts, marketing experts and users to understand the real situation of the company. Many people who have worked for Twitter say the platform is still alive because of the technical strength and reputation it has built over the past 17 years.

"you can turn off both engines of a jet at the same time, but the plane can still taxi," said one former employee who has worked on Twitter for seven years. " However, he added that people should be concerned about recent privacy vulnerabilities on Twitter, including those that could affect Twitter Circles, which should only send certain tweets to specific users. However, these tweets were made public.

"if the product falls apart behind the scenes in a way you can't see," the former employee said, "that's a very bad sign."

However, any attempt to write an eulogy for Twitter is too early. After all, Musk has a lot of experience of overcoming challenges. Although there are a large number of competitors, such as Substack and Artifact, there is still no competitive platform to achieve the kind of rapid growth that Twitter needs. In part, this is because Twitter has many super users (including journalists) who seem unwilling and unable to exit the platform, so it is not clear where the new digital city square will be. Another problem is that in the era of the rise of TikTok, the world seems to be moving away from text-based social media applications.

The reasons for how Twitter loses its relevance and may even die out are complicated. However, how it survived under Mr Musk's chaotic management is a complete mystery.

Two indicators indicate Twitter's decline to assess the viability of any for-profit social media platform, you can ask two basic questions: are people using it? Is it profitable?

On the first question, Musk said that the use of Twitter hit an all-time high of 8 billion minutes a day, but these claims are not supported by external estimates. While these external estimates may not be accurate, they at least suggest that Twitter is actually not as popular as it was before Musk took over.

Twitter traffic fell 7.7% in March compared with the same period last year, the third consecutive month of year-on-year decline, according to SimilarWeb. The analytics firm also found that the number of unique web visitors to Twitter fell 3.3% in March from a year earlier, while the average number of daily active users on Twitter's Android version fell 9.8% in March from a year earlier.

These numbers may not be devastating for Twitter, which was losing users before Mr Musk took over, but they stand in stark contrast to Mr Musk's constant restatement that user numbers are "better than ever".

The gap between Musk's figures and third-party estimates can be explained by the different metrics they use. Even if traffic declines, participation (that is, people interacting with content on Twitter) is likely to be higher. Musk also said that he is most concerned about "user time with no regrets." This new metric may have been proposed by Musk, which refers to the time people spend on the platform, which they think is well worth it.

Of course, since Twitter is no longer a public company, it doesn't have to share details about the number of its users on a regular basis. This means that only Musk and Twitter have direct access to internal data on user engagement and time spent. As a result, outside estimates of these indicators do not perfectly reflect the size and growth of Twitter users. However, these third-party statistics raise serious doubts about Musk's claim that Twitter usage is at an all-time high.

The second is the question of whether Twitter makes money. The company has two main sources of revenue, advertising revenue and subscription revenue, but neither seems to perform very well.

As of last month, more than half of Twitter's top advertisers still refused to place ads on Twitter because of concerns about Musk's unstable online performance, including his tweets promoting conspiracy theories, according to intelligence firm SensorTower by Pathmatics. In a recent interview, Mr Musk said advertisers "mostly come back", but he did not name them.

Later this month, Musk will address advertisers at a major marketing conference hosted by advertising giant MMA, where he will also be interviewed by Linda Yaccarino, a global advertising executive at NBC. For Musk, this could be a good opportunity to help allay concerns about fleeing the brand and try to convince them that Twitter's business has returned to normal. But some media reported that in private, advertisers were worried about Musk's attendance at the meeting, such as fears that he might make "racist remarks."

If Musk can't attract advertisers back, he will need more support from subscribers to Twitter's LV certification service. This is a recently revised subscription plan that provides users with blue verification check marks and other benefits by charging users, such as making their tweets more prominent.

This will be a huge challenge. Because the latest indicators show that only 0.2% of Twitter users pay for authentication services. According to SimilarWeb, about 116000 people signed up for the service in March, an increase of 138 per cent over the previous month. Nevertheless, this is far from enough to make up for the loss of advertising expenses.

However, Mr Musk has been working on a plan to get more people to subscribe to verification services. Musk said that starting from April 20, Twitter will eventually remove the check marks of all previously verified users who do not currently pay for Blue V authentication services. Many well-known users and newsrooms, including the New York Times, said they did not plan to pay $8 a month for each employee or $1000 a month for their organizations.

It's hard to convince Twitter users to pay for what they used to get for free. Eric Huffett, an industry analyst at Mobile Dev Memo, said on Twitter: "I doubt whether Twitter certification service can become an important source of profit. I am more inclined to think that social media platforms cannot rely on subscriptions as their main source of revenue."

But the real signs of Twitter's demise may be more than just numbers. The problem is that for many users, spending time on the platform makes them feel unhappy.

The user experience is even worse, and there is another more subjective way to determine whether a social media app is dying, and that is the quality of the user experience.

This is a more difficult indicator to quantify, and there are a variety of opinions on these changes on Twitter. However, under Musk's leadership, Twitter as a product has been significantly affected in some ways.

For example, Twitter used to be a place where people, especially journalists, gathered together to get important news. But Trump's arrest on Twitter this month has not caused much uproar, and there are far fewer tweets about it on Twitter than in the past. This may be because Mr Musk has been making the platform less journalist-friendly, but it could also be because Twitter has become harder to use.

Technically, Twitter has experienced a series of notable outages, making it an unreliable app. Although Twitter has experienced outages before, the frequency of outages has been higher recently. Twitter reportedly experienced four outages in February this year. Even if the site is not completely down, there is often a major functional glitch, such as when many Twitter users were temporarily unable to respond to tweets on the web earlier this week.

Musk has also made a number of controversial changes to the core design of Twitter, including the push function, which shows that more users are not following what they post. While some people like the change, others find it difficult to track the status of the users they really follow.

"in the past, I used to get more feedback from people and topics I followed," says Nalan Yurtsever, a resident pathologist at Northwell Health who mainly uses Twitter to track scholars in her field. "now I feel worse. I spend less time on it now because it's less important."

Other users complain that because of Twitter's authentication feature, anyone can now pay for it, making it harder for them to distinguish between facts and made-up stories.

Another major concern about users' daily experience is hate speech.

In November last year, Musk began granting "amnesty" to thousands of accounts previously banned for hate speech, violence or misinformation. Unsurprisingly, many external reports show that hate speech has been on the rise since then. According to a report released by the Anti-Digital hatred Center in December last year, the number of defamation against black Americans has increased from an average of 1282 to 3876 per day since Musk came to power. Research by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue found that the number of anti-Semitic tweets doubled from June 2022 to February 2023.

Musk insists that these reports are false and that hate speech on Twitter is decreasing. But it is hard to say how many people have seen such hate speech. As Musk has previously claimed, Twitter may lower the ranking of people who make hate speech, so that even if there are more examples of hate speech, the tweets will be read less frequently.

Overall, there must be some users who like Musk's changes to Twitter's Twitter feature and content censorship policy. Many of them tend to belong to a few groups: loyal fans of Musk, people whose accounts have been blocked by Twitter, and people who share the same interests as Musk's fan base, such as cryptocurrencies and Tesla enthusiasts.

As a result, one might say that over time, we will not see Twitter die out completely, but will downsize to accommodate a smaller user base.

Why hasn't Twitter died out? Despite so many problems, Twitter continues to be active for several main reasons.

First, Musk succeeded in drawing attention to Twitter by creating drama around his actions. He seems to come up with new promotional gimmicks every week, such as changing the logo on Twitter apps and websites to dogcoin icons, or the sign outside Twitter headquarters to "Titter". Musk recently gave an interview and attracted more than 3 million listeners on Twitter. By contrast, only about 2 million people watch Fox News during prime time. In other words, Musk is a top news maker.

While Musk's antics alienated many users of Twitter, most conservatives praised his efforts at Twitter, saying he freed the company from what they considered too strict content censorship policies. In fact, the number of conservative fans has increased in the days since Musk took over.

Twitter also shows some signs of revival in advertising. Although many brands have left the platform, a few big companies, including McDonald's, Disney and Apple, are still advertising on the platform.

But so far, the main reason Twitter continues to survive is that there is no competitor. For example, the decentralized network Mastodon attracts many journalists. But unlike Twitter, Mastodon runs on a different server, which makes it difficult for ordinary users to use.

Substack, a popular newsletter platform, recently became another competitor to Twitter, and Musk recently banned the company on Twitter. But it's not clear how much time Substack users are willing to spend on individual tweets when they get used to reading the writers they follow in their inboxes. Then there is Artifact, a startup founded by Instagram co-founder Kevin Strom, which is still in its early stages. Even Meta is reported to be developing text-based social networks, although it is not clear how it works.

"Twitter is unique, with breaking news and cultural heritage," said Lou Paskalis, an advertising executive and chief strategy officer at Ad Fontes Media. He added that despite the recent changes on the Twitter platform and Musk's "indifference to the most important things for advertisers and the things loved by the platform's heavy users", he insisted on using Twitter.

If we want to know about the future of Twitter, we can take a look at its new parent company, X. It has something to do with Musk's long-announced plan to turn Twitter into a Wechat-like super app that can be used to pay, order food and hail a taxi.

Patti Williams, a marketing professor at Wharton who studies people's perceptions of the company, believes the move may have something to do with Mr Musk attracting his supporters. She said Musk had "shaken" Twitter's reputation and damaged trust between Twitter and journalists and viewers. But these people are just one type of audience. Although Musk has alienated all news fans, cultural creators and politicians, he may be gaining more loyal users, including Tesla enthusiasts, programmers, cryptocurrency traders and gamers.

In essence, Musk is damaging Twitter's brand strength, but he has also built a whole new brand in the process. "the name Twitter is of great value, but only if it stays the way it used to be," Williams said. "

So, is Twitter really dying? The answer is that the old Twitter is dead. We all live in Musk's more chaotic, dramatic and polarized Twitter world. What is uncertain is what the new Twitter or X will eventually look like, and whether it will survive in the future.

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