Last year, one of the richest and most successful men in the world, Elon Musk, purchased Twitter for around $40bn. Since its purchase, the South African businessman has made vast changes such as rebranding the platform as ‘X’, which has upset many users. Let’s have a look at how Musk’s changes have affected the landscape of Twitter for its users and use.
Radical Changes
Established since 2006, Twitter’s users were very much used to steady features of the platform such as limited character tweets and verified accounts for people such as celebrities and influencers. However, the latest changes made by Elon Musk have shaken the platform and it’s users. During the month of July, most users will have seen the logo of the app gone from the iconic blue bird to an « X » which shows the desire for Musk to move Twitter away from its former identity and to rebrand the company.
The Twitter « Blue tick » is no longer designed for high profile personalities, but for users willing to be paying for a subscription. Twitter Blue subscribers pay a monthly fee for access to certain premium features. Musk has decided, in the last year, to create an edit button on tweets as well as have an unlimited number of characters when writing on Twitter. These features are part of the demands made repeatedly from users in the past. However, these new features are available to only users willing to pay the premium subscription, showing the change of direction in policy at Twitter.
Twitter, not so popular anymore ?
With many changes on the platform, as well as inside the company, Elon Musk has established that he is transforming the company and its structure. However, these changes have not pleased everybody and has had an impact on Twitter and its statistics. Twitter’s ad-portal traffic plunged 20.6% in June 2023 from the year before, according to data from Similarweb. Twitter has lost almost half of its advertising revenue since it was bought by Elon Musk for around $40bn last October, its owner has revealed.
On top of that, overall traffic on the platform has declined steadily since January, falling 5.8% as of June. Engagement on Twitter’s app also fell during that same period, from roughly 88 million users to 83 million, or 5.5%. Elon Musk is trying to change the way people use the app and encourage more interaction, since as a user you can get more advertising revenue with the more engagement you get from your posts. However, for the moment, the changes have slightly backfired. It does remain to be seen whether the changes will have a long term negative effect and indeed if Musk can guide the platform back to a more comfortable position.
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