Honestly, it’s hard to work out what X is trying to achieve by sharing vague, non-contextualized performance figures, many of which are tracked in seconds, outside of trying to dupe people with ridiculously high surface-level figures.
X has quickly established a track record for amplifying misleading data points, which X CEO Linda Yaccarino is apparently carrying into 2025, based on her latest insight:
Here’s a stat that blows my mind: Users spent 364 billion seconds on X last year. That’s 11,500 years collectively ????????
— Linda Yaccarino (@lindayaX) January 14, 2025
As you can see, Yaccarino has shared that X users, cumulatively, spent 364 billion seconds in the app in 2024. Which, as Yaccarino notes, equates to 11,500 years in collective time spent.
The context missing here is that this is (presumably) 364 billion seconds per day in the app, not in total for the year, which is an important distinction, as 364 billion user seconds in total would only equate to 0.07 minutes spent in the app, per user, per day.
Which is really not good.
What Yaccarino meant to note is that X now sees 364 billion active user seconds every day, a stat that it had previously shared in its 2024 overview.
Which sounds impressive, but 364 billion total active user seconds per day, when divided by X’s reported 250 million daily actives, further equates to around 24 minutes per user, per day.
Which is still a lot, though it’s not as much as X claimed back in March, when it said that users are spending 30 minutes per day in the app, on average.
It’s also lower than the 8 billion cumulative active user minutes per day, on average, which it also reported in March, which equates to 480 billion daily user seconds.
The data then actually suggests that X either saw a significant drop-off in usage throughout the year (around 6 minutes per user per day), or that its own reported stats are conflicted.
Further, at 24 minutes per user, per day, that’s less than Twitter was seeing before Elon Musk took over that the app, which, at one time, reported that users were spending 38 minutes per day in the app.
Of course, without the full context, we can’t know for sure what Yaccarino is reporting, and X, again, is notoriously not transparent with its data and figures.
But essentially, what Yaccarino is touting as an achievement is seemingly not at all, and if anything, it shows that X saw more of its users spending less time in the app as the year went on.
We don’t know, of course, because X is a private company, and therefore doesn’t have to provide official data on usage. But its own numbers suggest this, no matter how X tries to re-frame them.
That’s not to say that X is failing, 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 highlighting a reporting anomaly.
This is more a note on X’s chaotic reporting, and the lack of accurate, consistent data from the platform, or a full explanation of what such data represents.
It may well be that different reporting methodologies are being applied at different times, and that could explain the variance, and it could be that X is seeing a rise in active usage among a smaller number of active users.
But the point here is that the framing is important. And a billion of seconds sounds much more impressive than what it actually represents.
