Twitter predicted to lose more than 30m users in next two years

The report predicts that Twitter’s global monthly users will decline by nearly 4% in 2023 and a further 5% in 2024, making a total of more than 32-million people. These would be the first user declines since Insider Intelligence began tracking Twitter in 2008.

“More unstable and less pleasant” is the expectation of the report’s authors, noting that there will be a particularly steep decline in the key US market.

No single event will cause collapse of Twitter

“There won’t be one catastrophic event that ends Twitter,” a principal analyst at Insider Intelligence, Jasmine Enberg, said. “Instead, users will start to leave the platform next year as they grow frustrated with technical issues and the proliferation of hateful or other unsavoury content.

“Twitter’s skeleton staff, working around the clock, won’t be able to counteract the platform’s infrastructure and content moderation problems.”

Critically for the future economic viability of the platform, Insider Intelligence has also slashed its forecast for ad revenue growth, saying it will be “essentially flat” as advertisers pull back amidst growing brand safety concerns.

Should Twitter eventually fail, it would not be the first social media platform to do so. Vine, which specialised in social media video, has gone. So too has Google Plus. MySpace still exists, although in a very different guise, and most experts believe its decline is terminal.