Tim Urban engagement report

Compared with accounts its own size

Tim Urban's engagement rate beats 88% of the tracked X accounts closest to it in follower count (3,862 accounts, accounts of similar size (decile 9 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 55% 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 0.301%, Tim Urban sits above the 50th percentile of the 37,350 accounts in this comparison. That places it in the above the median band, which runs 0.081% to 0.437%.

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 16:00 UTC, and Sunday 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.

Reading these numbers

A typical post picks up 2.7K interactions against 900K followers, an engagement rate of 0.301%. Measured over 14 original posts, its engagement rate beats 88% of 3,862 tracked accounts of a similar size. Comparing inside a size band matters here: engagement rate falls as accounts grow, so a raw rate would mostly just re-measure the follower count. Posts are seen about 230K times each, and 1.18% of those impressions turn into an interaction. That is about 25.5% of the follower count, which is the gap between an audience on paper and an audience in a timeline. Posting runs at about 1.1 post a day over the last 30 days, with activity on roughly 57% of days. Most posts go out around 16:00 UTC, and Sunday is the busiest day of the week. Of the 14 posts sampled, 64% carry an image or video. The account's strongest tracked post pulled 110K interactions, about 41x its own typical post.

What is Tim Urban's engagement rate on X?

Tim Urban (@waitbutwhy) has an engagement rate of 0.301%, based on the median interactions across 14 original posts from the last 30 days against 899,816 followers. Replies, reposts and quote-posts of other people are excluded from that sample.

Is that a good engagement rate?

At 0.301%, Tim Urban sits above the 50th percentile of the 37,350 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 @waitbutwhy have real engagement?

Its engagement rate beats 88% of the tracked X accounts closest to it in follower count (3,862 accounts), which puts it in the top 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 @waitbutwhy post?

Most posts go out around 16:00 UTC, and Sunday is its busiest day, at roughly 1.13 posts per day across the measured window.