When there are such amounts of misinformation being passed along from X's team since Elon Musk purchased the app that seem to only make it look like the platform's doing something other than what it's truly doing, it's difficult to believe what they do say, because we don't know which information is supposed to be correct and which isn't.

But today we do have some new numbers from X, as part of a broader announcement of a new partnership with Integral Ad Science (IAS) on brand safety for vertical video ad placements.

X reports:

"A growing number of users are now actively watching and posting videos on X, driving the rapid growth of the service. Video is now part of more than 8 in 10 user sessions, and we've seen views increase nearly 30% year-over-year."

See, even this statement is vague because it is unclear what that even means: total video views or average video view? Back in the day you'd reach out to Twitter's comms department for some clarity, but now X doesn't even have a communications team, so no way of knowing what these figures actually represent.

But these numbers indicate that video content is getting more attention inside the app, and X further claims that over 100 million people watch vertical videos daily on the platform.

This is "Vertical video is the fastest growing surface on X. More than 100M people around the world are consuming vertical video daily, averaging over 13 minutes per day. On many days, vertical video accounts for about 20% of all time spent on the platform.".

And when seen in a broader context, it makes sense, because if the video change into vertical form of behavior as done by TikTok and Instagram, this would be followed by the same behavior trends in other apps. But, however, X's video player does not natively open to the vertical player, which, most users view video in-stream. And since X views 244 million daily actives in total, that's a lot of people it says are specifically going to video clips to view them, then scrolling through its video-specific feed.

So is that true? I don't know, and we can't even clarify.

Whatever the case, X is now looking to offer more assurance for brands wanting to show their ads within this vertical video feed.
By February 1, 2024, X will make access to our successful vetted inventory pilot, with Integral Ad Science, a leading media measurement and optimization platform, available to all US advertisers. Here, IAS categorizes all Vertical Video Ad adjacencies for brand safety and suitability aligned with the GARM framework.

X says that this will provide "maximum control over where their ads appear" to vertical video advertisers. Which would be a concern, given how many brands are now pulling back on X ad spend, ostensibly because of brand safety issues.

Though that concern is arguably more centered on what Musk himself has said than ad placement.

And, it reports, it's also reinforced this element by hiring more staff in its brand safety team.

For one, it is simply impossible to determine exactly what is occurring at X due to these conflicting and misleading bits of information that are being disseminated and/or amplified by Yaccarino and Musk at differing points in time.

For example, in October of last year Yaccarino claimed that X users were spending an average of 32 minutes per day in the app, although according to the latest data presented by Musk, the numbers are more like 23 minutes a day. Which isn't a huge gap at first blush, but that's a difference in engagement of close to 30%.

Musk has continued to tout bogus data points, such as website traffic numbers, to attempt to indicate that X is serving more traffic than Instagram and Facebook. Which it's not, but X does generate a staggering amount more visits through web browsers, compared with IG and FB, which now handle some 90% of their activity in-app.
This is like an attempt to lie by using this kind of framing, so it's pretty hard to trust most of the numbers reported by X.

This basically means you have to discount those broader numbers and instead concentrate on the specific engagement that you're seeing, or not seeing in the app.

Is your target audience active on X? Do brands and influencers in your niche post vertical video in the app?

If they are, then perhaps you should try the same for some experimentation and see if it works for your strategic objectives.