This American Life engagement report
@ThisAmerLife - 370K followers on X
Measured over 20 original posts from a 30-day window, last computed on September 1, 2026.
Engagement
A typical post picks up 9 interactions against 370K followers, an engagement rate of 0.002%. Measured over 20 original posts, its engagement rate beats 9% of 3,899 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 4.6K times each, and 0.195% of those impressions turn into an interaction. That is about 1.24% of the follower count, which is the gap between an audience on paper and an audience in a timeline. Posting runs at about 0.7 post a day over the last 30 days, though only 43% of days saw any activity at all. Most posts go out around 13:00 UTC, and Monday is the busiest day of the week. Of the 20 posts sampled, 55% carry an image or video and 95% link out. The account's strongest tracked post pulled 83 interactions, about 9.2x its own typical post.
Measured over 20 original posts from a 30-day window, last computed on September 1, 2026.
Compared with accounts its own size
This American Life's engagement rate beats 9% of the tracked X accounts closest to it in follower count (3,899 accounts, accounts of similar size (decile 6 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 0.002%, This American Life sits above the 10th percentile of the 37,856 accounts in this comparison. That places it in the bottom 25% band, which runs below 0.012%.
Show the percentile table
| Percentile | Engagement rate |
|---|---|
| 10th percentile | 0.002% |
| 25th percentile | 0.012% |
| 50th percentile | 0.081% |
| 75th percentile | 0.439% |
| 90th percentile | 2.10% |
| 99th percentile | 155.6% |
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 Monday 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.
Show engagement by hour posted, utc as a table
| Hour (UTC) | Vs author median | Posts |
|---|---|---|
| 00:00 UTC | -1% | 53K |
| 01:00 UTC | -2% | 53K |
| 02:00 UTC | -3% | 52K |
| 03:00 UTC | -4% | 55K |
| 04:00 UTC | -6% | 44K |
| 05:00 UTC | -4% | 43K |
| 06:00 UTC | -4% | 50K |
| 07:00 UTC | -5% | 54K |
| 08:00 UTC | -4% | 63K |
| 09:00 UTC | -3% | 72K |
| 10:00 UTC | -2% | 75K |
| 11:00 UTC | -3% | 81K |
| 12:00 UTC | -2% | 90K |
| 13:00 UTC | -2% | 98K |
| 14:00 UTC | -3% | 101K |
| 15:00 UTC | -2% | 105K |
| 16:00 UTC | -4% | 102K |
| 17:00 UTC | -3% | 95K |
| 18:00 UTC | -1% | 88K |
| 19:00 UTC | -2% | 83K |
| 20:00 UTC | -1% | 77K |
| 21:00 UTC | -1% | 69K |
| 22:00 UTC | -2% | 60K |
| 23:00 UTC | -2% | 53K |
Show engagement by day of week as a table
| Day | Vs author median | Posts |
|---|---|---|
| Sunday | +5% | 238K |
| Monday | 0% | 302K |
| Tuesday | -3% | 302K |
| Wednesday | -1% | 257K |
| Thursday | -2% | 250K |
| Friday | -3% | 259K |
| Saturday | +3% | 233K |
Best tweets
- Aug 17, 20269.2x their median
The teenager Ira Glass related to more than anyone he's ever done a story about. Hear the episode: https://t.co/bSmkAQIcTa https://t.co/CD4CxCzh3T
- Aug 31, 20267.2x their median
A guy hooked two Claude chatbots up to talk to each other. Each one insisted it was the real AI, and the other one was human. What happens when they can't stop talking? Hear the story: https://t.co/yJptfnxHzd https://t.co/GtjXspAjCh
- Aug 5, 20264.3x their median
How was Ira's Russian? https://t.co/UKo0OQRUz1
- Jul 28, 20264.1x their median
"This is not something that brings about workplace harmony." https://t.co/WPauEznHkF https://t.co/LB1yMpTr88
- Jun 29, 20263.8x their median
Sarah Vowell has a theory that you can tell the entire history of the United States by standing on one street corner—Michigan Avenue and Wacker Drive in Chicago. https://t.co/2F2HANJ9HD
- Jul 6, 20263.4x their median
What happens when you tell Americans not to do something? Just one of the stories in our newest episode "Maximal Americanness." https://t.co/9wmMIIvJ8B https://t.co/UrPwHhay7w
- Jul 17, 20262.9x their median
The government set out to prove that Antifa is real, in the first federal case charging people with material support to terrorists for their involvement. https://t.co/HAxq8Z4xkl https://t.co/nkMSNfYkoq
- Jun 28, 20262.6x their median
How do you get a message out of a detention center? At an ICE facility in San Diego, detainees figured it out — bottles with notes taped on, thrown over 90 feet of wall. Listen: https://t.co/YlTIzOfuCc https://t.co/feo9qOaKne
- Aug 17, 20262.4x their median
Ira and Tobin were both called "husky" as kids. Decades later, neither of them has quite shaken it. This week's episode has four stories about the power of labels. Listen: https://t.co/MBSsrjBD8c https://t.co/YaA44wSgCC
- Jun 22, 20262.3x their median
At the Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego, migrants figured out an ingenious way to communicate with the activists gathered outside of the detention center’s walls. https://t.co/u0X6VnUXKp https://t.co/9ySaDkWy8Z
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 9 interactions against 370K followers, an engagement rate of 0.002%. Measured over 20 original posts, its engagement rate beats 9% of 3,899 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 4.6K times each, and 0.195% of those impressions turn into an interaction. That is about 1.24% of the follower count, which is the gap between an audience on paper and an audience in a timeline. Posting runs at about 0.7 post a day over the last 30 days, though only 43% of days saw any activity at all. Most posts go out around 13:00 UTC, and Monday is the busiest day of the week. Of the 20 posts sampled, 55% carry an image or video and 95% link out. The account's strongest tracked post pulled 83 interactions, about 9.2x its own typical post.
- What is This American Life's engagement rate on X?
- This American Life (@ThisAmerLife) has an engagement rate of 0.002%, based on the median interactions across 20 original posts from the last 30 days against 370,463 followers. Replies, reposts and quote-posts of other people are excluded from that sample.
- Is that a good engagement rate?
- At 0.002%, This American Life sits above the 10th percentile of the 37,856 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 @ThisAmerLife have real engagement?
- Its engagement rate beats 9% of the tracked X accounts closest to it in follower count (3,899 accounts), which puts it in the bottom 10% 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 @ThisAmerLife post?
- Most posts go out around 13:00 UTC, and Monday is its busiest day, at roughly 0.7 posts per day across the measured window.