Finland and Germany remain loyal to X, statistically speaking

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The microblogging service X continues to lose reach in the European Union. This is according to data that the company has to publish every six months in the EU. Statistically, 109.2 million users in the EU saw at least one tweet per month in the six months to March 2024. In the six months to March 2025, this figure was only 94.8 million. In mathematical terms, this is a decrease of 13 percent. If you go back one and a half years, the decline is even 25 percent. There is no older data.

But watch out! These figures are far too high, as the actual range is considerably lower. You don't even have to look for bots, which X may be incorrectly counting as people, but simply look at the first two transparency reports that X published after the Digital Services Act (DSA) came into force. There, the company reveals that it counts every user anew if they access X from another EU country during the observation period.

And X readers are obviously keen to travel. The 109.2 million average monthly tweet recipients from a year ago were actually only 66.1 million individual users, according to X's count. The total is inflated by at least two thirds. Admitting this is likely to be difficult for X. The information is missing in the two most recent reports. It should not be overlooked that some X users have more than one X account, which is likely to lead to further multiple counting. And X probably doesn't know how many of the millions of EU users are real people and how many are bots (or, more recently, AI agents).

Counted x times

Counting the same users x times makes interpreting the data considerably more difficult. Countries on the edge of the EU, such as Lithuania, will have significantly fewer traveling X users than centrally located countries such as Germany or Austria. And anyone crossing a country will tend to surf less on X in a smaller country such as Luxembourg than when crossing a large country such as France or Spain over a longer period of time.

A comparison of the current figures with those from a year earlier is therefore useful as an indicator of trends; the absolute figures are not very meaningful. In addition, X counts logged-in users on the one hand and users who are not logged in on the other, and then adds these two groups together. It is not clear whether double counting occurs here as well. X is not available for media inquiries.

Users give in to pressure to log in

Finally, X has also severely restricted access for users who are not logged in. This should encourage interested parties to create an account or log in. This tells X more about the recipient, allowing it to charge higher prices for the advertisements it displays.

This pressure works, at least in part. While the average number of monthly tweet readers in the EU has fallen by 13% year-on-year, as mentioned above, the drop in recipients who are not logged in is 26%. Among those who are logged in, the decline is limited to four percent. This indicates a shift from readers who are not logged in to readers who are logged in. This means that the decline in advertising revenue is likely to be less than the decline in reach.

Individual countries very different

Significantly divergent trends can be seen in the individual EU countries. The figures for readers who are not logged in have fallen significantly everywhere, from minus eight percent in Romania to -35 percent in Poland and -37 percent in Spain. For Germany, X shows minus eleven percent, for Austria -22 percent.

The trends for logged-in readers are even more varied. The number has fallen in 16 countries and risen in eleven. The largest increases are in Finland with +67%, followed by Croatia with +21%. In Germany, the increase is five percent, in Austria eight percent. Enormous decreases were recorded in Lithuania (-53%), Luxembourg (-45%), Poland (-40%) and Romania (-37%).

If you add up the number of logged-in and non-logged-in users, it becomes clear that the total number of recipients in each EU country also fell last year – with one exception: X shows an increase of 22% for Finland. Germany is the only country to have hardly moved at all, with only -0.49 percent in the statistics. As already mentioned, this also includes all visitors to Finland and Germany who have accessed a tweet there.

The largest decreases in total reach were recorded in Lithuania (-43%), Luxembourg (-41%), Poland (-40%) and Romania (-30%). Austria is below the average at minus six percent.

(ds)