One Year Into Musk’s Takeover, X Is Flopping—Paris Hilton to the Rescue

There’s very little that’s surprising about Elon Musk’s flailing X anymore. Now, a year after he finally purchased the platform, the data is in and the outcome is to be expected: X is not doing so hot.

SimilarWeb reports that global web traffic to the platform was down in just about every area of the platform between September 2022 and last September. For example, global traffic to the platform on desktop was down 14% year-over-year while mobile traffic languishes at 17.8% on iOS and Android combined in the U.S.

SimilarWeb notes that Musk’s incessant flame war with media outlets is likely not helping his case. Most recently, the billionaire removed headlines from links shared on X, calling into question its place as a “global town square” and bastion of free speech Musk keeps touting it as. On the bright side, page visits to Musk’s own profile and posts rose 96% in the last year.

“The downdraft is not unique to X, with other leading social networks also seeing negative comparisons,” David F. Carr, senior insights manager at SimiliarWeb. “In aggregate, traffic to the top 100 social networks and communities that Similarweb tracks was down -3.7% year-over-year in September.”

At the same time, TechCrunch reports X tapped Paris Hilton as a celebrity endorsement. The platform partnered with the socialite and entrepreneur on a custom X icon only available to Premium subscribers. The icon is bright pink with sparkles and is apparently the first in a long line of collaborations between X and 11:11, Hilton’s media company. Hilton will also reportedly work with X on live video, live commerce and live audio according to the outlet.

Musk officially took over the Twitter/X platform in October last year, and it’s been downhill ever since. The Tesla CEO made a bizarre series of choices to upend much of the digital infrastructure the platform built over the last decade and a half. This past April, court filings revealed that Musk was rebranding the company name from Twitter Inc. to X Corp. The platform itself eventually became known as X after the URL twitter.com began redirecting to X.com this past summer.

Since the rebrand, Musk has more recently allowed users to restrict replies to only those with blue checkmarks and disabled the mechanism allowing users to report inaccurate content. The billionaire also appointed former NBC ad executive Linda Yaccarino as company CEO, who has been forced to clean up the mess left behind by Musk’s bid to create a website for everything.

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