On November 11^th I posted (here) that I thought the subscriber / follower numbers were being impacted by such as the UK’s Online Safety Bill bringing in age verification rules.

Whether that is people leaving or just dead accounts and bots being discovered – who knows. Probably all of the above.

This is just a quick update on X / Twitter totals – which appears to have had a massive drop again.

BTW – I know Elon wouldn’t like me using the name Twitter – but has he tried to search for an X?? If I don’t add the old name, I’ll never find the posts again (there are over 1,500 posts at this point).

Anyhoo.

We’re looking at my group of 28 comedian’s accounts.

Up to October 20^th everyone’s numbers were still growing. There had been some hiccups along the way but, overall, the trend was upwards.

Then we started to see numbers fall off a cliff and then, this past few days, followers were creeping back up again. Until today,

Unfortunately, this blog template does not have coloured font – so please note (apart from the first number) these are -ve numbers, not just hyphens.

The group totals varied as below:

• Oct 11 to Oct 20 // +605,035
• Oct 20 to Nov 7 // -998,674
• Nov 7 to Nov 19 // -1,169,991

Which means from my Oct 20 baseline to Nov 19 the change has been -2,168,665

The biggest drops seem to have been for the accounts that have been around the longest. Plus, the bigger names were possibly attracting bots, which are being cleaned up.

Also note that while someone like Jimmy started out with 6.3m, Michael McIntyre only started from 1.1m. Apart from Rogan’s account there’s pretty much a correlation between the more followers you started with – the bigger the loss has been.

From Oct 20 to Nov 19:

• Kevin Hart // -1,030,931
• Jimmy Carr // -237,319
• Ricky Gervais // -212,438
• Aziz Ansari // -208,480
• Jack Whitehall // -188,119
• Chris Rock // -108,974
• Russell Peters // -39,453
• Jim Gaffigan // -36,565
• Russell Howard // -28,621
• Sarah Millican // -21,704
• Joe Rogan // -15,956
• John Mulaney // -15,956
• Michael McIntyre // – 12,309

And on it goes.

Totals are from LiveCounts.io