This past weekend, following the very first Presidential debate in the United States, X owner Elon Musk put up this statistic in which he claims that the site reached an "all time high" in usage.

Third-party reports, however, are at odds with Musk as they indicate that X usage is actually dropping, that the site X is losing relevance and attention, and that Musk's experiment has not, thus far, been much of a success on social media.

So which is true: X is at new all-time highs or Elon is making up new metrics, and then pitching them as success points?

Well, it's hard to say without all of the data available.

Looking at the metrics themselves first. Elon says that X saw 76 billion total user seconds in the U.S.

That's not a time frame, but presumably the 76 billion seconds falls into one day. That would equate to over 21 million hours of cumulative time spent in the app, which is obviously a heap of attention. But breaking that down by total U.S. users (100m), that equates to 12.6 minutes per user in the U.S.

Not so great, considering X reported back in March that users were spending an average of 30 minutes a day on X.

Which is why further qualification of these numbers is important, because I actually suspect that X doesn't have 100 million daily actives in the U.S., and that this could be a monthly usage figure. Yet, even if you were to take that down to 50 million daily actives in the U.S., that still only comes out to 25 minutes per day, per U.S. user, based on these metrics.

Much less impressive is a number of 76 billion user seconds.

Which is probably why Musk and Co. are trying to shift the conversation to the larger number, but even that is more misleading in that it doesn't represent actual engagement. What advertisers ultimately care about is how many people they can get their advertising to inside the app, so on that level, cumulative seconds is actually a pretty meaningless metric.

But Elon says that user seconds is "the hardest to game," and therefore the best indicator of actual human engagement. I don't know if that's really true either, but that's what X is sticking with, so these are the stats that they're publishing.

And X reports that even though the breakout to minutes per user has taken effect, it's now at an all-time high on this count

But is that ever all time for Twitter and X, or just X? If just X, then that's, what, a year of data?
I don't know, it's all very speculative, and because it's not directly comparable with what other services report, it doesn't really mean anything. Unless you're within X, and you want to celebrate a new milestone of some kind.

So is Musk's claim true? Sure, if it is that could indicate X's use, broadly speaking, has been down, because those user seconds numbers, when viewed, aren't all that impressive.

At the bottom of it all though, if your audience is there it may prove worthwhile as an ad network. The expanded thoughts from that are, though, down to your own sense of things.