It was another big weekend for X, with the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump driving more conversation in the app.

While the details, as ever, require a bit of skepticism.

Today, X owner Elon Musk claimed the platform had hit a new "record high" in usage.
That means, Musk says, X saw a cumulative "417 billion user-seconds globally" in one day, or 27.8 minutes per user, at 250 million daily actives.

A lot, sure. But not nearly as much, in any case, as X claimed in March, when it said users were spending an average of 30 minutes per day inside the app.
In other words, so it's either not a record, or X made a mistake in its reporting earlier in the year.

Which I suspect is the case, as 417 billion seconds also comes out to 6.95 billion minutes, well below the 8b that X also claimed in March.
But this amount, Musk continued, "translates to only 15.5 minutes per user on average, assuming 100 million U.S. users - which X has in the past claimed.". Which is not particularly high per-person usage, and on balance, looking at the numbers, really, it's hard to measure what either of these data points actually mean as we don't have enough qualifying info to measure how cumulative user seconds apply to reach and resonance among X users.

The only assumption we can make is that X is reaching fewer people, so it's switched over to reporting cumulative seconds instead. Yet at the same time, X is a valuable utility for real-time breaking news events, given Meta's stated aversion to the same for its Twitter-like Threads app.

So X, by all accounts, is certainly putting on a good show, and this is indeed just the type of thing it should be promoting its use for. The problem is that its own data is confusing and convoluted, and it seems to contradict itself so often that no one can know what any of its usage numbers actually mean.

From a marketer's perspective, advertisers have asked questions like, How many people is it possible to reach? How long do people stay engaged? What are they engaged with? Based on this, advertisers can then make an informed choice about how they can reach people in the app, although I am unsure if X's data will provide such insight.

Rather, it seems to be some kind of concerted attempt to conceal usage decline, if there even is one occurring or not at all, since it cannot seem to make up its mind about its performance numbers.

If X wants to be transparent, as Musk claims it does, full utilization figures in users should be published, and performance scrutinized with more room.