Interview Preparation

Twitter, now xnewly established CEO Linda Yaccarino touts the company’s success and X’s future plans in a company-wide memo obtained by CNBC. The executive once again states, without sharing any specific metrics, that usage of the service is at an “all-time high” and hints at what’s to come in terms of new product experiences for the newly renamed platform.

The service formerly known as Twitter has been working to become more than just a social network and more of an “everything app,” as a proprietary. Elon Musk nicknamed him.

Like the Telsa and Space X executive explained in October 2022telegraphing Twitter’s eventual rebranding, the Twitter purchase was intended to be “an accelerator to create X, the app of everything.”

His grand plan has been to create an application that allows creators to monetize their contentthen moves to payment services and even bankingMusk commented during a Twitter Spaces live stream with advertisers in November. At the time, he even mentioned the possibility of setting up Twitter money market accounts that would pay a high interest rate to attract consumers to X.

Those potential product concepts were mentioned again in Yaccarino’s new letter, when he writes: “Our usage is at an all-time high and we will continue to delight our entire community with new experiences across audio, video, messaging, payments, banking, creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services and opportunities.”

Twitter, now X, has already implemented some of Musk’s ideas on video and creator monetization. In May, the company began allowing subscribers to upload two-hour videos at your service that the advertiser Apple took advantage of when released the first full episode of his hit Apple TV+ show “Silo” on the platform. Fired Fox News host Tucker Carlson had been post long videos to Twitter too, until he ordered a stop for the network.

Also, earlier this month, Twitter started sharing ad revenue with verified creators.

However, all is not well in Twitter X, whose traffic, at least according to third-party measurements, has been falling. Web Analytics Company Data Similarweb indicated that Twitter web traffic decreased by 5% during the first two days that its latest rival, Instagram Threads, was generally available, compared to the previous week. Additionally, Similarweb said Twitter web traffic was down 11% compared to the same days in 2022. Additionally, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince earlier this month tweeted a graph of traffic to the Twitter.com domain showing “Twitter traffic tanks,” he said.

yaccarino subtly rejected those reports at the time, claiming that Twitter had its busiest day from February to early July. She did not share any specific metrics or data. At the same time, however, the company was quietly blocking links to Threads.net in Twitter searches, suggesting he was worried about new competition.

Today, Yaccarino repeats his vague claims about high X usage in his company-wide memo, even as Forrester analysts predict X will be closed or acquired in the next 12 months and many critics agree that rebranding X is bound to fail.

Yaccarino’s memo, by the way, was mostly a bunch of cheerleading, applauding the X team for their work and touting X’s ability to “wow the world again,” as Twitter once did.

The full memo, courtesy of CBNC, is below:

Hi team,

What a momentous weekend. As I said yesterday, it’s extremely rare, whether in life or in business, that you get the opportunity to make another great impression. That is what we are experiencing together, in real time. Take a moment to put everything in perspective.

17 years ago, Twitter left a lasting mark on the world. The platform changed the speed at which people accessed information. It created a new dynamic in the way people communicated, debated, and responded to things going on in the world. Twitter introduced a new way for individuals, public figures, and brands to build lasting relationships. In one way or another, we are all drivers of that change here. But equally, we were constantly challenged by all of our users and partners to dream big, innovate faster, and reach our great potential.

With X we will go even further to transform the global city square and impress the world again.

Our company has the unique drive to make this possible. Many companies say they want to move fast, but we like to move at the speed of light, and when we do, that’s X. At our core, we have an inventor mindset: we’re constantly learning, trying new approaches, changing to get it right, and ultimately succeeding.

With X, we serve our entire community of users and customers by working tirelessly to preserve free expression and choice, create unlimited interactivity, and create a marketplace that enables economic success for all its participants.

The best news is that we are well on our way. Everyone should be proud of the pace of innovation over the past nine months, from long-form content to creator monetization to tremendous advances in brand safety protections. Our usage is at an all time high and we will continue to delight our entire community with new experiences across audio, video, messaging, payments, banking, creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services and opportunities.

Please don’t take this moment for granted. You are writing history and there is no limit to our transformation. And everyone is invited to build X with us.

Elon and I will work with all the teams and partners to bring X to the world. That includes keeping our entire community up to date, ensuring we all have the information we need to move forward.

Now, let’s make the next big impression on the world, together.

Beautiful

x i your thoughts, or contact Sarah Perez via email (sarahp@techcrunch.com) or Signal (415.234.3994).