Social Rocket
X continues to lose reach in the EU. The new transparency report under the Digital Services Act shows another decline in active users, after the platform had already lost around 15 percent of its EU reach in the second half of 2025.
The latest declines are smaller, but they confirm the trend: X has not yet made up for the sharp drop from the previous year.
DSA data shows usage remains weaker
The European DSA reports are among the few regularly published usage figures for X that are collected under a uniform regulatory methodology. Under these rules, X must disclose the average monthly active recipients of its services in the EU.
The platform had temporarily gained users again in the first half of 2025. In the second half of the year, however, active EU usage fell sharply. The new report for the first half of 2026 shows no real recovery.
For comparison, according to its latest transparency report, TikTok now reaches 189 million monthly active users in the EU. LinkedIn also now reports 56,5 million active EU users and publishes its reach figures regularly within the DSA framework.
Advertising business remains under pressure
Reach trends matter to advertisers because they directly affect the addressable audience. Social Media Today also points to recent financial data, according to which X is said to have generated around $710 million in advertising revenue in the first half of 2026. That would be about 18 percent less than in the same period a year earlier.
The gap is even larger compared with the former Twitter business: in the first half of 2022, advertising revenue was around $2,2 billion according to the company's reports at the time.
For marketers, this does not automatically mean X is unusable as an advertising channel. A smaller platform can still bundle valuable audiences in certain topic areas. However, the decline makes reliable reach and performance data more important than general claims about supposed record usage.
X is developing new revenue models in parallel
X is also trying to reduce its dependence on advertising. From 8 September 2026, the existing Creator Revenue Sharing is due to be replaced by the new Original Content Rewards Program. We summarise the details in our overview of creator monetisation on X, YouTube, TikTok and other platforms.
Regulatory changes could also influence how social networks are used in the future. Australia, for example, is considering an opt-out for algorithmic social media feeds.
For German social media teams, X therefore remains a channel whose actual reach should be measured more closely and assumed less.