Similarweb: in March 2023, Twitter's traffic fell 7.7% YoY, the third straight month of decline, web visitors fell 3.3% YoY, and Android app DAUs fell 9.8% YoY
Say goodbye to the old Twitter and hello to the new normal. — It's been a year since Elon Musk initiated his takeover of Twitter.
Context & Ripple Effects
A year into Elon Musk's ownership, Similarweb's numbers give the clearest outside read yet on Twitter's trajectory — necessary now that the company is private and no longer publishes its own metrics, unlike April 2020 when it still reported record mDAUs of 166M alongside quarterly results. The March declines extend a pattern visible all through the buyout: internal research flagged an exodus of "heavy tweeters" dating back to the pandemic, and Similarweb tracked ad manager visits collapsing by 74–85% YoY in October and November.
What makes this month different is breadth: total traffic, web visitors, and Android app usage are all falling together rather than one metric dipping. The subsequent arc confirms it wasn't noise — Similarweb later measured X's global website traffic down 14% YoY in September and UK daily users sliding from 8M to 5.6M between May 2023 and late 2024, even as traffic to Musk's own profile page surged 96% YoY.
First-order effects
- Advertisers get harder evidence that the audience they were already retreating from is shrinking on every surface — web, mobile app, and total traffic — after the ad-manager collapse had already signaled their pullback.
Second-order effects
- With Twitter private and self-reported metrics gone, Similarweb becomes the de facto scorecard for advertisers and press, meaning third-party panels now shape perception of the platform's health more than any company disclosure.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points toward a platform trading broad-reach scale for personality-driven attention — traffic concentrating around Musk himself while aggregate usage erodes — a structure where advertiser demand decouples from headline user counts and follows engagement niches instead.
The trend: Under private ownership, X's audience decline is being charted entirely by third-party measurement firms, marking a shift from company-reported growth metrics to external panel data as the arbiter of platform health.