It’s sort of ironic that one of the most tweeted about topics in the tech scene is the perception that Twitter is going downhill. It’s nearly impossible to bring the company up without someone asserting that it is doomed to fail, and tech media never seems to run out of content that seems to support this notion. However, it’s important to think about why people judge Twitter to be a fallen behemoth, and when looking into this issue, it becomes clear that a lot of this negativity tends to center around one major metric that has been used to judge social networks since their inception: monthly average users (MAUs).

This number, which measures the number of users who have signed in and used the service at least once over a designated month, is said to measure how much activity there is within a social network, and in the past, this was generally a valid metric. People had to log in to talk to their friends and look through their feed, so MAUs accurately counted how many people were actively using a product. And as an early competitor in the social network landscape, this principle held true for Twitter at its inception, when most people only followed and tweeted to their real life friends.

But the function of Twitter has greatly changed over the past couple of years. Rather than being a place for people to interact with their inner circle, it’s become home to a wide assortment of news sources, celebrities, and marketers. Instead of chatting with friends, people now use the platform to have in depth conversations with people they’ve never met. While only ten years ago, people would turn on their TVs to catch the latest news, now people check through the plethora of tweets on their feed. Twitter has expanded to become something far bigger than the simple 140 character based social network it once was. It is now a bustling hub where people consume many different kinds of content, and this view is primarily curated by the content creators themselves rather than Twitter’s internal algorithms.

The average Twitter use case has greatly changed as a result of this shift. In the past, users would scroll through their firehose to find the few bits of content they were actually interested in. While this pattern definitely still holds true for most regular users of the site, most critics of the platform have neglected to mention an entirely new generation of Twitter users: those who forgo accounts and instead simply consume the content created by their favorite sources about their favorite topics.

Because so many large corporations and personalities now have Twitter accounts, one of the best ways to consume content now lies in visiting individual pages and viewing all the content on these. Moreover, this task does not require a Twitter account, so anyone around the world can, for example, view the official Olympics Twitter to get caught up on the medal count.

Additionally, many people now utilize Twitter without ever viewing the site. News sites have adapted to the social media age by embedding tweets in their content, allowing readers to see tweets without having to visit Twitter at all. As a result, for many people, there is no longer an incentive for them to create accounts and regularly check their news feed. They simply use Twitter when it is convenient for them or when it is thrust upon them.

Even though Twitter’s users have changed, the metric used to describe them has not. The validity of measuring MAUs rests upon a simple assumption: most users of the site will be registered and logged in so they can respond, like, and retweet parts of their feed. However, in a world where most Twitter visitors either view tweets embedded in articles or only occasionally visit a specific user’s tweets, this assumption is no longer guaranteed. Because all of Twitter’s content can technically be viewed without an account, visitors who don’t see value in having a tailored news feed won’t make accounts, and consequently, they won’t add to Twitter’s MAUs.

Because so many people now view Twitter in a context outside of the main Twitter ecosystem, it’s easy to see why MAUs no longer really matter. Even if only 300 million unique people log in and check Twitter a month, it’s likely that perhaps even billions of unique visitors view at least one tweet on the site during this same time period. These unseen users are part of the Twitter ecosystem, but they are not interacting with the website in traditional ways. Instead, they view only the content they seek out.

It’s far more difficult to measure this metric of monthly unique visitors, as many complications in the actual calculation occur. Individual users can view a specific tweet multiple times if they read many articles that feature it, and it’s difficult to track how many times an individual refreshes Frank Ocean’s Twitter page when he is about to release a new album. Despite these difficulties though, Twitter’s recent changes demonstrate that they are aware of this new type of user. They acknowledge that their platform is changing, and instead of focusing on fostering content creation, they must now improve the user experience behind content consumption.

For example, Twitter’s forays into live streaming through the election and the NFL demonstrate a movement away from the standard goal of getting people to make accounts. People were able to view these live streams even if they weren’t logged in, and Twitter made sure to integrate a live tweet feed alongside these streams to make sure they had offered a unique way to view these events. In addition to watching the actual events, viewers would be able to see the reactions to exciting moments as they happened. These investments make it clear that Twitter is creating a new form of media which integrates both content itself and the discussion around the content.

However, just because Twitter’s growth isn’t problematic on it’s own doesn’t mean that Twitter doesn’t have problems. Twitter still remains massively unprofitable, and though it’s revenue growth has been relatively solid besides a few hiccups, it’s still a long way away from becoming profitable.

The true issue in this revenue generation actually lies in Twitter’s failure to adapt to it’s new typical user. Most of Twitter’s ads come in the form of promoted tweets which are shown on targeted groups of individual news feeds. Consequently, ads are not shown on either embedded tweets or specific user pages, the new primary use cases that have arisen out of the new Twitter. If Twitter wants to sustainably create revenue, then it will need to figure out a way to monetize these unregistered users.

There are a few naive solutions to accomplish this. To monetize popular user pages, Twitter can start putting ads that visitors of these pages would like to view. For example, Twitter can post Spotify ads on musicians’ pages. To monetize embedded tweets, Twitter can perhaps begin charging for use of its API so that media outlets which frequently embed tweets will have to pay sizable sums for this service.

It’s clear to see though that these solutions come with their downsides. Users are never happy when they see more ads, and media companies would likely complain if they were suddenly charged for a service that was previously free. But despite these dangers, I’m confident in Twitter’s ability to overcome these issues as well as other ones that come up. They’ve managed to stay ahead of the curve in figuring out how to integrate the new wave of unregistered visitors, and they’ve adequately managed to monetize their current user base.

Moreover, even if Twitter remains unprofitable, they are still incredibly likely to stick around either in the form of an acquisition or monetary assistance. Twitter’s services are now just too valuable for us to stop using them. Even if the average registered user stopped logging in to create content, hundreds of millions of visitors would still flock to the tweets of the Kanyes and Kardashians of the world. Twitter still holds an incredibly invaluable role in the way we consume media now, and that is unlikely to stop anytime soon.