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Frankly, it’s hard to see what X is trying to accomplish by sharing vague, uncontextualized performance numbers, many of which are tracked per second, other than trying to fool people with ridiculously high surface-level numbers.
X quickly established a record for amplifying wrong datawhich X CEO Linda Yaccarino apparently carries over into 2025, based on her latest insight:
Here’s a statistic that blew my mind: users spent 364 billion seconds on X last year. That’s 11,500 years together ????????
— Linda Yaccarino (@lindayaX) January 14, 2025
As you can see, Yaccarino shared that X users, cumulatively, spent 364 billion seconds in the app in 2024. Which, Yaccarino notes, equates to 11,500 years in shared time spent.
The missing context here is that it’s (probably) 364 billion seconds per day in the app, not the total for the year, which is an important distinction, since 364 billion total user seconds would equate to only 0.07 minutes spent in the app , per user , per day.
Which is really not good.
What Yaccarino wanted to note is that X is now seeing 364 billion active user seconds every daystatistics he previously shared his review for 2024.
Which sounds impressive, but 364 billion total active user seconds per day, when divided by X’s logged in 250 million daily activefurthermore, it amounts to about 24 minutes per user per day.
Which is still a lot, although not as much X requested back in Marchwhen it was said that users spend an average of 30 minutes a day on the app.
It is also lower than 8 billion cumulative active user minutes per dayon average, which also reported in March, which equates to 480 billion daily user seconds.
The data then actually suggests that X has either seen a significant drop in usage over the year (about 6 minutes per user per day), or that its reported statistics are conflicting.
Improve, 24 minutes per user, per day, that’s less than Twitter saw before Elon Musk took over the app, which at one time reported that users were spending 38 minutes a day in the application.
Of course, without full context, we can’t know for sure what Yaccarino is reporting, and X, again, is notoriously non-transparent with its data and figures.
But essentially, what Yaccarino touts as an achievement is seemingly not at all, and if anything, it shows that X has seen more and more of its users spend less time in the app as the year has gone on.
We don’t know, of course, because X is a private company, so it doesn’t have to provide official usage data. But his own numbers suggest so, no matter how X tries to reframe them.
This is not to say that X is a failure, nor is it a criticism of X, or Elon, or free speech, or the human race, or whatever else Elon’s fans want to put on me for pointing out the anomaly in the reporting.
This is more of a note on X’s chaotic reporting and lack of accurate, consistent data from the platform or a full explanation of what such data represents.
It is possible that different reporting methodologies are applied at different times and this could explain the variance, and it could be that X is seeing an increase in active usage among a smaller number of active users.
But the point is that framing is important. And a billion seconds sounds a lot more impressive than what it actually represents.