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Freakonomics engagement report

@Freakonomics - 580K followers on X

Measured over 8 original posts from a 30-day window, last computed on October 10, 2026.

Engagement

Bottom quarter for its size
Per follower
0.003%
of 580K followers
Per impression
0.153%
10K views on a typical post
Reach
1.80%
of its followers see a post
Typical post
16
interactions (median)
Saved
0.048%
5 bookmarks on a typical post
Posting rate
0.6/day
active 33% of days
Peak time
13:00 UTC
Saturday

A typical post picks up 16 interactions against 580K followers, an engagement rate of 0.003%. Measured over 8 original posts, its engagement rate beats 20% of 19,932 tracked accounts of a similar size. That is a reason to look at how the audience behaves - reply depth, saves, whether the followers are recent - rather than a conclusion about it on its own. Posts are seen about 10K times each, and 0.153% of those impressions turn into an interaction. That is about 1.80% of the follower count, which is the gap between an audience on paper and an audience in a timeline. Posting runs at about 0.6 post a day over the last 30 days, though only 33% of days saw any activity at all. Most posts go out around 13:00 UTC, and Saturday is the busiest day of the week. Of the 8 posts sampled, 100% carry an image or video, 63% are part of a thread and 25% link out. The account's strongest tracked post pulled 83 interactions, about 5.2x its own typical post.

Measured over 8 original posts from a 30-day window, last computed on October 10, 2026.

Compared with accounts its own size

Freakonomics's engagement rate beats 20% of the tracked X accounts closest to it in follower count (19,932 accounts, accounts of similar size (decile 10 of 10)). A percentile is spread evenly by construction, so 50 really is the middle of that group and 90 really is its top tenth.

On engagement per impression rather than per follower it beats 11% of the same group. When those two numbers disagree, the gap is about how far its posts travel rather than how people react to them.

Where this sits in the catalog

At 0.003%, Freakonomics sits below the 10th percentile of the 201,555 accounts in this comparison. That places it in the bottom 25% band, which runs below 0.024%.

p100.004%
p250.024%
p50 (median)0.142%
p750.671%
p902.53%
p9982.5%
Engagement rate as a share of followers, across the 201,555 accounts we have scanned enough to measure. The axis is logarithmic, because the top and bottom of this population are about 22,929 times apart and a linear axis would flatten everything below the median into a single point.
Show the percentile table
Engagement rate percentiles
PercentileEngagement rate
10th percentile0.004%
25th percentile0.024%
50th percentile0.142%
75th percentile0.671%
90th percentile2.53%
99th percentile82.5%

This ruler is the whole measured catalog, not a size-matched group: it shows where the raw rate falls across every account we can measure, all of which are large. For a like-for-like comparison, read the size-band percentile above instead. See how the bands are built

Posting timing

This account posts most often around 13:00 UTC, and Saturday is its busiest day of the week. The bars below are the catalog-wide pattern, with this account's own busiest slot marked. They do not show how this account performs at each hour: we keep one aggregate per account, not one per hour, so that measurement does not exist in our data.

Engagement by hour posted, UTCTwenty-four bars, one per UTC hour. Each bar shows how posts published in that hour compare with their own authors' median engagement. Bars above the centre line ran higher than the median, bars below ran lower. A marker flags Busiest hour: 13:00 UTC.
0003060912151821
Above the authors' own mediansBelowScale: plus or minus 111%Busiest hour: 13:00 UTC
Show engagement by hour posted, utc as a table
Engagement by hour posted, UTC
Hour (UTC)Vs author medianPosts
00:00 UTC-1%89K
01:00 UTC-2%90K
02:00 UTC-3%88K
03:00 UTC-4%94K
04:00 UTC-5%76K
05:00 UTC-4%75K
06:00 UTC-5%86K
07:00 UTC-5%93K
08:00 UTC-4%108K
09:00 UTC-4%124K
10:00 UTC-3%129K
11:00 UTC-3%141K
12:00 UTC-3%154K
13:00 UTC-3%167K
14:00 UTC-4%173K
15:00 UTC-2%176K
16:00 UTC-3%171K
17:00 UTC-3%159K
18:00 UTC-2%149K
19:00 UTC-2%141K
20:00 UTC-1%131K
21:00 UTC0%116K
22:00 UTC-2%100K
23:00 UTC-1%90K
Engagement by day of weekSeven bars, one per weekday, Sunday first. Each bar shows how posts published on that day compare with their own authors' median engagement. Bars above the centre line ran higher than the median, bars below ran lower. A marker flags Busiest day: Saturday.
SunMonTueWedThuFriSat
Above the authors' own mediansBelowScale: plus or minus 111%Busiest day: Saturday
Show engagement by day of week as a table
Engagement by day of week
DayVs author medianPosts
Sunday+5%393K
Monday+1%483K
Tuesday-2%520K
Wednesday-3%472K
Thursday-2%430K
Friday-3%447K
Saturday+2%393K
See what moves engagement across the whole catalogWhat counts as a good engagement rate at this size

Formats this account uses

Its own posting mix on the left, and what each of those formats does across every account we track on the right. Only formats where the effect clears our publish test appear here, so an empty row is a format we could not measure rather than one that does nothing.

This account's posting mix compared with catalog-wide effects
FormatThis accountCatalog effect95% intervalAccounts behind it
Image or video100% of posts+111%+108% to +115%34K
Outbound link25% of posts-41%-42% to -40%32K
Typical length-+15%+14% to +16%32K
  • 100% of this account's sampled posts carry an image or video. Across the catalog, posts with an image or video run 111% above the same accounts' other posts.
  • 25% of its posts carry a link off X. Across the catalog, posts with an outbound link run 41% below the same accounts' other posts.
  • Its average post runs 372 characters, which falls in the over 280 characters band. Across the catalog, posts over 280 characters run 15% above the same accounts' other posts.

These are catalog-wide differences applied to this account's own posting mix, not a measurement of how each format performs for this account specifically. We keep one median per account, not one per format per account, so the second thing is not something this data can tell you.

Best tweets

  • Sep 8, 20265.2x their median

    We’ll take “Things That Made Our Day” for $2,000. https://t.co/Nb1cDEUN3F

    7931014K viewsView on X
  • Sep 17, 20264.2x their median

    Kurt Warner doesn’t believe great athletes rise to the occasion. The Hall of Fame quarterback has played in some of football’s biggest arenas. But when Stephen Dubner asked what made him so good under pressure, Warner offered a different way of thinking about it … Maybe the greats don’t suddenly get better when the stakes are highest. Maybe most people shrink under pressure. This week on Freakonomics Radio, @kurt13warner talks about why it’s so hard to predict which quarterbacks will succeed in the NFL.

    5465218K viewsView on X
  • Aug 9, 20262.8x their median

    Social clubs. Churches. Synagogues. Bowling leagues. Maybe they mattered more than we realized. Rabbi Angela Buchdahl and Stephen Dubner on YouTube now. https://t.co/e8z935oR57 https://t.co/pObwP4HzvF

    3572016K viewsView on X
  • Aug 9, 20262.0x their median

    If you're going to make something new, take some risks and try to make it NEW. Stephen explains the thinking behind Better in Person. Watch it now on the Freakonomics YouTube channel. https://t.co/5iTUdOMZbi https://t.co/Ycuf06MO2w

    2822017K viewsView on X
  • Aug 10, 20261.8x their median

    $750 billion. That's roughly how much is being spent on A.I. infrastructure today. Current revenues from A.I. are only a fraction of that. As former S.E.C. chair Gary Gensler says, we’ve seen that kind of imbalance before. This week on Freakonomics Radio, Stephen Dubner talks with Gensler about the economics behind the A.I. boom, why investment often races ahead of revenue, and what history can teach us about what happens next.

    2323112K viewsView on X
  • Sep 26, 20261.5x their median

    When is a bet not a bet? Our two-part series on prediction markets has generated a lot of discussion from our listeners. Many of you are dead-set against the very idea of them. Freakonomics Radio producer Theo Jacobs has spent the past few months digging into some of the thornier questions that prediction markets haven’t yet answered.

    133719.8K viewsView on X
  • Oct 1, 2026

    Good game, better conversation. Thank you, Ed! https://t.co/Wh4AaeZnzC

    1731012K viewsView on X
  • Sep 1, 2026

    This week on Better in Person... 30 years ago, James Daunt was an independent bookseller. Today, he’s C.E.O. of Barnes & Noble (@BNBuzz) and running the very bookstore chains that once ruled the industry. His philosophy on running a global chain? Think local. https://t.co/6fUS4a1pFB

    116207.5K viewsView on X
  • Aug 22, 2026

    She's won a Pulitzer and still sometimes feels like an imposter. @Egangoonsquad https://t.co/SRHuMXJoVU

    882016K viewsView on X
  • Aug 16, 2026

    Warren Zanes prices in the value of mistakes. https://t.co/tJgZnFIHsU

    1611018K viewsView on X

Ranked by total interactions across everything we have tracked for this account, which is a longer history than the 30-day window the rates above use. The multiple compares each post to this account's own median.

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Reading these numbers

A typical post picks up 16 interactions against 580K followers, an engagement rate of 0.003%. Measured over 8 original posts, its engagement rate beats 20% of 19,932 tracked accounts of a similar size. That is a reason to look at how the audience behaves - reply depth, saves, whether the followers are recent - rather than a conclusion about it on its own. Posts are seen about 10K times each, and 0.153% of those impressions turn into an interaction. That is about 1.80% of the follower count, which is the gap between an audience on paper and an audience in a timeline. Posting runs at about 0.6 post a day over the last 30 days, though only 33% of days saw any activity at all. Most posts go out around 13:00 UTC, and Saturday is the busiest day of the week. Of the 8 posts sampled, 100% carry an image or video, 63% are part of a thread and 25% link out. The account's strongest tracked post pulled 83 interactions, about 5.2x its own typical post.

What is Freakonomics's engagement rate on X?
Freakonomics (@Freakonomics) has an engagement rate of 0.003%, based on the median interactions across 8 original posts from the last 30 days against 580,450 followers. Replies, reposts and quote-posts of other people are excluded from that sample.
Is that a good engagement rate?
At 0.003%, Freakonomics sits below the 10th percentile of the 201,555 accounts in this comparison. Those comparison accounts are all large ones, because our scanning cadence is weighted towards big accounts, so this is a ranking among peers of similar scale rather than a ranking across X.
Does @Freakonomics have real engagement?
Its engagement rate beats 20% of the tracked X accounts closest to it in follower count (19,932 accounts), which puts it in the bottom quarter for its size group. Ranking inside a size band matters because engagement rate falls as accounts grow, so a raw rate would mostly re-measure the follower count. It is a starting point for a look at follower quality, not a verdict on it.
When does @Freakonomics post?
Most posts go out around 13:00 UTC, and Saturday is its busiest day, at roughly 0.6 posts per day across the measured window.

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