Company

One year in, the future of X is bright

By
Thursday, 26 October 2023

October 27 marks the one-year anniversary of this platform under new ownership and management.

I am incredibly proud of the work our team has been doing to accelerate the future of X.

So let me share with you where we stand today:

  1. Freedom of expression. X is now a place where everyone can freely express themselves, so long as they do so within the bounds of the law. We believe open and respectful discourse is the single best way for humanity to thrive.
  2. Safety. Safety on X remains a critical priority – our work is not done, but we are making real progress. Our trust and safety team is working around the clock to combat bad actors and consistently enforce our rules in areas such as hate speech, platform manipulation, child safety, impersonation, civic integrity and more. We also remain committed to privacy and data protection.
  3. Partnerships. Our team also has ongoing dialogue with external groups to keep up to date with potential risks and support the safety of the platform – partners like the Technology Coalition, Anti-Defamation League, American Jewish Committee and Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism.
  4. Time spent. Our fiercely loyal users are living more of their lives on X – with 7.8B+ active minutes on X per day, driven by growth in our Video and Communities products. Today, the average user spends more than 32 minutes of their day on X.
  5. User base. Over half a billion of the world’s most informed and influential people come to X every month. That’s inclusive of our efforts to aggressively remove spam and inauthentic accounts – a step we believe is critical to improve the X user experience and grow the platform. We continue to see sign-ups average around 1.5 million per day.
  6. Misleading or inaccurate information. We have made real progress in our work to combat misinformation from all sides on X. Community Notes now has over 100K contributors in 44 countries and growing. This product is not perfect, but it is improving rapidly. Notes are being seen tens of millions of times per day, and they are getting much faster – a necessity in a world where breaking information is inherently uncertain and X has outperformed traditional media.
  7. Brand safety and suitability. X advertisers now have a level of control that largely did not exist one year ago. Thanks to new products like Adjacency Controls, Sensitivity Settings and third party measurement partnerships with industry leaders Integral Ad Science and DoubleVerify, the average brand safety score on X is now >99%, and we are now seeing brand suitability scores at >97% when these controls are applied.
  8. Advertiser momentum. Our willingness to listen and take action on brand safety has been recognized by the advertising community. Since mid-May, all major agencies have reversed their pause guidance against advertising on X. Last quarter alone over 1,700 advertisers returned to X, from small businesses to major brands – including 90 of the top 100 ad spenders from a year ago. We are committed to making X the best place for businesses to launch new products, connect with culture and drive people to buy.
  9. From Twitter to X. We transformed Twitter into X, the everything app, where everyone is increasingly connected to everything they care about. This move enabled us to evolve past a legacy mindset and reimagine how users around the world consume, interact, watch and, soon, transact – all in one seamless interface. We have become the modern global town square.
  10. Product and infrastructure velocity. We shipped over 200 products and features post-acquisition with a significantly smaller team. How did we achieve this? We rebuilt and simplified large parts of the systems and infrastructure powering our main product surfaces from the ground up, which allowed us to maintain platform stability and innovate faster. We also invested in our machine learning capabilities with model architecture improvements and investments in on-prem GPU clusters to increase content relevance for our users.
  11. Verification and premium subscriptions. We have incentivized quality content while at the same time combating spam and bots. Today, the average X Premium subscriber spends three times longer on the platform than a non-subscriber. We have launched this offering in over 200 countries and territories worldwide, and created more utility and fun with new features like longer posts and videos, audio and video calls, bookmarks, edit posts, prioritized rankings and verification – to name a few.
  12. Verified Organizations. X is leading the market in business verification – our Verified Organizations subscription enables organizations to verify and create a network of on-platform affiliate handles, access all of our premium features and expand their organic reach. We have also rolled out the beta version of X Hiring, our very own recruitment platform.
  13. X Hiring. Through a Verified Organizations subscription, businesses can now post a job listing directly on the platform. Our engaged and educated audience makes for some of the most exceptional employees in the world. From software engineers, to healthcare professionals, to sales associates – hundreds of companies are already finding their next hires on X.
  14. Welcoming the creator economy. You can now create, connect and collect all on X. We have enabled the economic success of creators via our relaunching of Creator Subscriptions and our ad revenue sharing program. So far, we have paid out more than $20 million to our creator community – creators big and small are spurring our flywheel effect.
  15. Building communities. More people are getting together in X Communities, now available to all countries in English plus Japan. The conversations are public, discoverable and always lively. We see 70,000 people join a new Community each day, with time spent rising 300% since May.
  16. Messaging and calling. Direct messaging on X is a completely enhanced experience from a year ago. We rolled out encrypted messaging to X Premium subscribers, increased the limit on group DMs to 200 and added more message reply functionality. Just yesterday, we launched audio and video calling, enabling Premium subscribers to call any X handle in the world without having to give them their phone number.
  17. Make X yours. One of the most powerful things about X is how unique the experience can be to each and every one of us. From the “For You” tab to adding bookmarks to making Lists and Communities pinnable to the Home Timeline, we have introduced more personalization features to help make X yours. We also open-sourced our algorithm to increase transparency and invited our community to help us improve our recommendation algorithms. Any platform committed to transparency would do the same.
  18. Long form content. We added the ability for X Premium subscribers to post up to 2 hours of 1080p or 3 hours of 720p video content. In one month alone, people watched 210 years worth of videos 30 minutes or longer, with Sports, Business, Gaming, Politics and Entertainment topping the charts. Meanwhile, you can now write or read an essay by posting up to 25,000 rich-text characters and embed images within posts. Each day 150,000 new long form posts are published, receiving more than 3 billion impressions.
  19. Vertical video. As video consumption on the platform grows, we have scaled the ability for users to watch a continuous loop of sound-on, vertical video. This surface already has over 100 million daily users – more than half of which are Gen Z, the fastest growing segment on X. Soon, we will GA Vertical Video Ads to all advertisers globally with a pre-bid, vetted inventory solution via our brand safety partners Integral Ad Science.
  20. Premium content. X is now home to more than 750 of the industry's most premium content producers – from the sports leagues, to premium publishers, broadcast networks, and creators. We are poised to grow these partnerships further while bringing original programming to X for the first time in the platform's history, in concert with both creators and brands.
  21. Enhanced advertising solutions. We have expanded our powerful advertiser solutions. Our new Keyword Ads product enables advertisers to pay for proximity to highly relevant conversations. Amplify Video continues to connect advertisers to their audiences via the world’s most premium and brand safe publisher content. And Vertical Video Ads will soon enable full-screen, sound-on advertising within our fastest growing video surface.
  22. API partners. The public conversation on X is a unique and powerful data set. We have streamlined and consolidated our subscription offering to cater to developers of all sizes, while continuing to provide free support to public utilities such as MTA, NWS and many more. By focusing on the value of our unique data we are quickly growing and expanding our data licensing business.
  23. Payments. We want money on X to flow as freely as information and conversation. We have already secured first money transmitter licenses in several states, and we are moving toward launching a global payment system – more soon!

This product innovation and business momentum stands on the shoulders of one of the most rigorous corporate restructurings in history. We are rebuilding our team and leadership to reflect the evolving needs of our customers and partners.

And if we can achieve all of this in just 12 months, just imagine the scope of our ambition for next year – from expanded search to newswires to payments, we are just getting started.

To our passionate and growing community and all of the teams, partners and customers who have been a part of this transformation, thank you.

One year in, the future of X is bright.

This post is unavailable
This post is unavailable.

This post is unavailable
This post is unavailable.