Is Twitter's Rebrand Losing the Platform Money?

Ariel Ariel
Oct. 6

This is a single insight from This Week in Apps - September in Review. Check out the full article for more insights.


September is behind us which means it's time to check in on X's (aka Twitter's) revenue, and unlike most of my previous check-ins, this one is interesting because it's the second full month of Twitter being X.

I talked about how the rebrand has lost X downloads more than once, so now we can see if revenue is also following the trend.

September wasn't a strong month for X, which by now, is no longer Twitter.

Downloads continued to drop "thanks" to the rebrand and the lack of discoverability, crossing into the single-digit millions.

Downloads haven't been that low since 2017...

Downloads have dropped consecutively from 13M in July, rebrand month, to 11M in August, and 9M in September, according to our estimates. And those downloads include the App Store, Google Play, and Twitter Lite on Google Play, which has seen downloads rise sharply as it's still branded "Twitter".

Revenue isn't happy either.

Although August was X's biggest month of app revenue to date, September took a sharp turn in the opposite direction.

Our estimates show net revenue in September was $4.8M, nearly a million dollars less than August.

Even though the drop was steep, X's revenue is still nearly twice as high as where it started in January.

Less revenue is never good, but I can think of a few reasons for that, and not all are terrible for the platform, so I'm curious to see what happens in the coming months as Twitter's creator payments continue to roll in and as the elections in the US become more of a hot topic.

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Tagged: #social-media

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