Twitter is losing its most active users

"Is Twitter dying?" billionaire Elon Musk asked in April, five days before he offered to buy the social media platform.

The reality goes far beyond a handful of examples of celebrities hiding their own accounts, according to internal Twitter research viewed by Reuters. Twitter is struggling to keep its most active users engaged, which is vital to the business, underscoring a challenge the Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) Inc CEO faces as he nears a deadline to close his $44 billion deal to buy the company. These "heavy tweeters" account for less than 10% of total monthly users but generate 90% of all tweets and half of global revenue. In an internal document titled "Where Have Tweeters Gone?", a Twitter researcher wrote that heavy tweeters have been in "absolute decline" since the pandemic began. The document defines a "heavy tweeter" as someone who logs into Twitter six or seven days a week and tweets about three to four times a week. The research also found a shift in interests among Twitter's most active English-speaking users over the past two years, which could make the platform less attractive to advertisers. According to the report, cryptocurrency and "not safe for work" (NSFW) content, including nudity and pornography, are the top topics of interest among heavy English-speaking users. At the same time, interest in news, sports and entertainment is declining among these users. Tweets on these topics are also the most attractive to advertisers, helping to burnish Twitter's image as the world's "digital town square," as Musk once called it. Twitter declined to say how many of its tweets are in English or how much money it makes from English speakers. But some analysts say this demographic is important to Twitter's business. Insider Intelligence analyst Jasmine Enberg said in an investor letter that the platform generated more ad revenue from the US alone in the fourth quarter than all other markets combined, and that most ads in the US are likely targeted at English-speaking users. Twitter's study looked at the number of English-language tweeters who showed interest in a topic based on the accounts they follow and how that number of users has changed over the past two years. Twitter was motivated to investigate "disturbing" trends among users that may have been masked by an overall increase in the number of daily active users and to better understand the decline in the company's most active users, the documents said. The study did not reach any specific conclusions on why the platform's heavy users were declining. Asked to comment on the findings of the internal documents, a Twitter spokesperson said on Monday: "We regularly conduct research on a wide range of trends that evolve based on what's happening in the world. Our overall audience has continued to grow, reaching 238 million mDAUs in Q2 2022," he said, using an acronym for monetizable daily active users. Follow Global Economic Developments on Social Media! Click here to follow Ieconomy official Facebook account! Click here to follow Ieconomy official Instagram account! Click here to follow Ieconomy official Twitter account!