X
- 3 days ago
- 5 min read
X no longer functions as a primary sales engine for most books, but it remains unusually dense where media power sits. Global estimates in late 2025 place X in the range of roughly six hundred million monthly active users, which keeps it among the largest social platforms despite a smaller footprint than Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube. Adults who use X spend around half an hour per day in the app, totaling hundreds of millions of hours of scrolling and commentary worldwide. In the United States, only a minority of adults report using X at all, yet a significant portion of those users treat it as a news feed. Recent surveys put regular news consumption from X close to 1 in 8 adults, a level that sits near Instagram and TikTok in the social news layer. At the same time, social media has overtaken television as the primary news source for Americans, and X remains one of the central channels through which political and public affairs narratives flow.
The reason is structural. X continues to host a concentrated share of people who produce and frame news. Large international surveys of working journalists show that a strong majority still maintain professional X accounts and that a substantial fraction name X as their single most important social network. Earlier research found that many reporters rely on X to find sources, monitor breaking events, and track how stories are being framed in real time. In other words, even as overall usage has become modest compared with larger networks, X still carries disproportionate weight among journalists, editors, commentators, and public intellectuals. For authors whose work touches politics, policy, culture, technology, finance, or any field where it is relevant to be quotable when a story breaks, that concentration of gatekeepers can matter more than raw audience size. Festival programmers, podcasters, and producers still scan X to see who already speaks clearly in public before they extend invitations.