In September, Elon Musk said X users were generating a lot of content — creating 100 to 200 million posts every day, excluding retweets — or reposts as they’re now known on X. But speaking at an event this morning, X CEO Linda Yaccarino offered a contradictory figure. She claimed X was seeing 500 million posts per day on the platform.
TechCrunch confirmed she stated this figure with the conference’s host, Imran Khan of Proem Asset Management, whose Khanference 2023 event brought together entrepreneurs, investors and academics in Dallas from October 3-4. Khan tweeted out the figure alongside other stats Yaccarino shared at the event, but this one caught our attention because it seems to be out of alignment with the figures X owner Musk was citing just weeks ago.
For context, Musk had said:
And it’s also important to bear in mind that there are 500 million, uh, 550 million monthly users — now going to maybe 600 million monthly users — And you know any given day there’s on the order of 100 to 200 million posts to the system…This a lot of material. In amongst the 100 to 200 million — and I’m excluding retweets, or reposts…
Musk’s statement about X seeing 100 to 200 million posts per day made waves at the time as it was seemingly another example of how X usage had declined over the years. As the website Social Media Today pointed out, for example, Twitter had documented seeing an average of 500 million posts per day back in 2013. Saying the platform now saw only 100 to 200 million posts would represent a drop.
This wouldn’t immediately appear to be inaccurate, though, because The Information recently reported that X’s daily active users have dropped by 3.7% to 245 million since Musk bought the company, when compared with figures Musk had tweeted last fall.
So which numbers are correct, Musk’s or Yaccarino’s?
As it turns out, it’s the latter, the company says.
An executive for X, who has been informally running comms since Yaccarino joined, told TechCrunch the 500 million posts per day is accurate, and noted that X also generates 100 billion impressions per day. To explain the discrepancy between the two execs’ figures, they explained that Yaccarino was discussing all conversational post activities, including the 100 million original posts per day, 100 million replies to posts every day, and the 300 million quote posts and reposts on X every day.
Musk was likely only referring to original posts in his talk. We still don’t know how bots factor into these numbers though.
Yaccarino shared a number of other X metrics during her chat, including the following, as cited from Khan’s tweets:
- People are spending 14% more time on X, with a 20% increase in consuming video
- Gen Z is the largest and fastest-growing segment — almost 200 million every month
- There’s a ton of activity on X — with 100 billion impressions every day
- Every single day 1.5 million people sign up (that’s up 4% from last year)
- Creators are a big priority for X. They’ve seen 10x increase in creators since June. Plus X has paid almost $20 million to creators via its ad rev program