Billionaire Elon Musk wondered in April, five days before putting in a bid to purchase the social networking site, “Is Twitter dying?” According to internal Twitter (TWTR.N) data seen by Reuters, the truth extends far beyond the few instances of famous people ghosting their own accounts. Twitter’s most active users, who are crucial to the firm, are becoming less engaged, highlighting a difficulty for Tesla’s (TSLA.O) CEO as he nears the deadline to finalise his $44 billion acquisition purchase.
Less than 10% of monthly active users are “heavy tweeters,” but they produce 90% of all tweets and 50% of global income. In an internal paper titled “Where did the Tweeters Go,” a Twitter researcher claimed that heavy tweeters have been in “total decline” since the pandemic started. According to the document, a “heavy tweeter” is someone who logs into Twitter six or seven days a week and tweets roughly three to four times per week. The most active English-speaking Twitter users’ interests have changed over the past two years, according to the study, which may make the site less appealing to marketers.
The survey revealed that among English-speaking heavy users, interest in cryptocurrency and “not safe for work” (NSFW) content, which includes nudity and pornography, is expanding at the fastest rate. At the same time, those consumers’ interest in news, sports, and entertainment is dwindling. Tweets about those subjects are the most appealing to advertisers, contributing to Twitter’s reputation as the world’s “digital town square,” as Musk famously put it. Twitter declined to disclose the percentage of tweets that are in English or the revenue generated by English-speaking users. However, other observers assert that the demography is crucial to Twitter’s operations.