“Is Twitter dying?” billionaire Elon Musk wondered in April, just five days before making an offer to purchase the social media platform.
According to internal Twitter (TWTR.N) research obtained by Reuters, the reality extends far beyond the handful of examples of celebrities ghosting their own accounts. Twitter is struggling to keep its most active users engaged, which is critical to the business, highlighting a challenge faced by Tesla (TSLA.O) CEO Elon Musk as he approaches a deadline to close his $44 billion deal to buy the company.
These “heavy tweeters” account for less than 10% of all monthly users but generate 90% of all tweets and half of all global revenue. A Twitter researcher wrote in an internal document titled “Where Did the Tweeters Go?” that heavy tweeters have been in “absolute decline” since the pandemic began.
According to the document, a “heavy tweeter” is someone who logs into Twitter six or seven days a week and tweets three to four times per week.
The study also discovered a shift in interests among Twitter’s most active English-speaking users over the last two years, which could make the platform less appealing to advertisers.
According to the report, the most popular topics of interest among English-speaking heavy users are cryptocurrency and “not safe for work” (NSFW) content, which includes nudity and pornography.
At the same time, users’ interest in news, sports, and entertainment is dwindling. Tweets about those topics, which have helped Twitter establish itself as the world’s “digital town square,” as Musk once put it, are also the most appealing to advertisers.
Twitter has refused to say how many of its tweets are in English or how much money it earns from English speakers. However, some analysts believe the demographic is critical to Twitter’s business.
According to its investor letter, the platform earned more ad revenue from the United States alone than from all other markets combined in the fourth quarter, and most ads in the United States are likely targeting English-speaking users, according to Insider Intelligence analyst Jasmine Enberg.
The study on Twitter looked at the number of heavy tweeters in English who showed an interest in a topic based on the accounts they followed, and how that number of users changed over the past two years.
According to the documents, Twitter was motivated to investigate “disturbing” trends among users that may have been masked by overall growth in daily active users and better understand the decline in the company’s most active users. The study did not draw any specific conclusions as to why heavy users of the platform are decreasing.
