Ars Technica engagement report
@arstechnica - 2.4M followers on X
Measured over 157 original posts from a 30-day window, last computed on August 31, 2026.
Engagement
A typical post picks up 21 interactions against 2.4M followers, an engagement rate of 0.001%. Measured over 157 original posts, its engagement rate beats 17% of 3,739 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 19K times each, and 0.113% of those impressions turn into an interaction. That is about 0.771% of the follower count, which is the gap between an audience on paper and an audience in a timeline. Posting runs at about 5.2 posts a day over the last 30 days, with activity on roughly 63% of days. Most posts go out around 17:00 UTC, and Friday is the busiest day of the week. Of the 157 posts sampled, 100% link out. The account's strongest tracked post pulled 8.0K interactions, about 380x its own typical post.
Measured over 157 original posts from a 30-day window, last computed on August 31, 2026.
Compared with accounts its own size
Ars Technica's engagement rate beats 17% of the tracked X accounts closest to it in follower count (3,739 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 10% 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 0.001%, Ars Technica sits below the 10th percentile of the 36,378 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 | 0.08% |
| 75th percentile | 0.432% |
| 90th percentile | 2.10% |
| 99th percentile | 161.0% |
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 17:00 UTC, and Friday 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% | 50K |
| 01:00 UTC | -2% | 51K |
| 02:00 UTC | -3% | 50K |
| 03:00 UTC | -4% | 53K |
| 04:00 UTC | -6% | 43K |
| 05:00 UTC | -4% | 42K |
| 06:00 UTC | -4% | 48K |
| 07:00 UTC | -5% | 52K |
| 08:00 UTC | -4% | 60K |
| 09:00 UTC | -3% | 69K |
| 10:00 UTC | -2% | 72K |
| 11:00 UTC | -3% | 78K |
| 12:00 UTC | -2% | 86K |
| 13:00 UTC | -2% | 94K |
| 14:00 UTC | -4% | 97K |
| 15:00 UTC | -2% | 100K |
| 16:00 UTC | -3% | 97K |
| 17:00 UTC | -2% | 90K |
| 18:00 UTC | -1% | 84K |
| 19:00 UTC | -2% | 79K |
| 20:00 UTC | -1% | 74K |
| 21:00 UTC | -1% | 66K |
| 22:00 UTC | -2% | 57K |
| 23:00 UTC | -2% | 51K |
Show engagement by day of week as a table
| Day | Vs author median | Posts |
|---|---|---|
| Sunday | +4% | 230K |
| Monday | 0% | 286K |
| Tuesday | -2% | 276K |
| Wednesday | -1% | 251K |
| Thursday | -1% | 244K |
| Friday | -3% | 252K |
| Saturday | +3% | 227K |
Best tweets
- Aug 27, 2026380x their median
Elon Musk’s xAI used child porn to train Grok models, lawsuit says https://t.co/EbfqBPgXzm
- Aug 27, 202616x their median
RFK Jr. spews anti-vaccine rubbish as newborn revealed to have died from measles https://t.co/OtvZKzQHlE
- Aug 27, 20269.4x their median
Claude, Codex, and Hermes installed unowned code inside corporate networks https://t.co/cuN2TYnP2e
- Aug 14, 20268.3x their median
Vulnerability giving attackers full control of Macs is under active exploitation https://t.co/VKQtom78TM
- Aug 19, 20267.8x their median
mRNA cancer vaccine succeeded in Phase 3 melanoma trial, Moderna and Merck say https://t.co/4vgTLeABwf
- Aug 17, 20267.6x their median
Hidden Airtag reveals Amazon is trashing rare books to train AI https://t.co/B0b1WHBtfU
- Aug 29, 20267.3x their median
I asked 100 companies for my data. Some deleted it instead. https://t.co/MV1UjerIlr
- Aug 21, 20266.6x their median
Trump admin calls for more spaceports to handle surge in launches https://t.co/gcoDPN61vD
- Aug 25, 20265.4x their median
SpaceX intends to invest up to $100 billion in massive Louisiana spaceport https://t.co/hTq74A6lFH
- Aug 28, 20265.1x their median
"RFK Jr. has lied to the Senate": Lawmakers call for criminal probe, ouster https://t.co/3zlE29WcXi
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 21 interactions against 2.4M followers, an engagement rate of 0.001%. Measured over 157 original posts, its engagement rate beats 17% of 3,739 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 19K times each, and 0.113% of those impressions turn into an interaction. That is about 0.771% of the follower count, which is the gap between an audience on paper and an audience in a timeline. Posting runs at about 5.2 posts a day over the last 30 days, with activity on roughly 63% of days. Most posts go out around 17:00 UTC, and Friday is the busiest day of the week. Of the 157 posts sampled, 100% link out. The account's strongest tracked post pulled 8.0K interactions, about 380x its own typical post.
- What is Ars Technica's engagement rate on X?
- Ars Technica (@arstechnica) has an engagement rate of 0.001%, based on the median interactions across 157 original posts from the last 30 days against 2,416,715 followers. Replies, reposts and quote-posts of other people are excluded from that sample.
- Is that a good engagement rate?
- At 0.001%, Ars Technica sits below the 10th percentile of the 36,378 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 @arstechnica have real engagement?
- Its engagement rate beats 17% of the tracked X accounts closest to it in follower count (3,739 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 @arstechnica post?
- Most posts go out around 17:00 UTC, and Friday is its busiest day, at roughly 5.23 posts per day across the measured window.