Twitter is losing its most active users, internal documents show

“Is Twitter dying?” asked billionaire Elon Musk in April, five days before he offered to buy the social media platform.

The reality, according to an internal Twitter poll seen by Reuters, goes far beyond examples of celebrities using third parties to manage their own accounts.

Twitter is struggling to keep its most active users engaged, underscoring a challenge faced by Tesla’s chief executive as he nears closing his $44 billion deal to buy the company.

These users represent less than 10% of overall monthly users, but they generate 90% of all tweets and half of global revenue. The most active users have been in “absolute decline” since the beginning of the pandemic, a Twitter researcher wrote in an internal document.

A “heavy user” is defined as someone who accesses Twitter six or seven days a week and tweets about three to four times a week, according to the document.

The survey also found a shift in interests over the past two years among Twitter’s most active English-speaking users, which could make the platform less attractive to advertisers.

Cryptocurrency and content that includes nudity and pornography are the fastest growing topics of interest among the most active English-speaking users, according to the report. And interest in news, sports and entertainment is waning. Tweets on these topics are most desirable for advertisers.

Twitter was motivated to investigate trends among users that may have been masked by the general growth of users and to better understand the decline of the most active users.

Asked, a Twitter spokesperson said: “Our overall audience continued to grow, reaching 238 million monetizable daily active users in Q2 2022.”

Twitter is one of the few major social media platforms that allows nudity on its service, and the company estimated that adult content makes up 13% of Twitter, according to a presentation seen by Reuters.

Advertisers often avoid controversy or nudity for fear of harming their brands. Major advertisers, including Dyson, PBS Kids and Forbes, suspended advertising due to accounts claiming child pornography on Twitter.

Topics that have traditionally made Twitter a popular platform for its millions of users are now in decline among its most active users, the documents show.

Interest in world news as well as liberal politics has shown spikes during major events such as the attack on the US Capitol in January 2021. But the categories have since lost the most number of most active Twitter users and have shown no signs of slowing down. recovery, according to the report.

Twitter is also losing a devastating number of more active users who have an interest in fashion or celebrities, like the Kardashian family, and are moving to platforms like Instagram and TikTok, one researcher wrote.