Elon Musk’s threat to charge all X members to use the service could hasten what is already turning into an exodus of users.
Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to subscribe!People are spending less time on the service formerly known as Twitter, as well as on its new rival, Meta Platforms Inc.’s
META,
Threads.
“Engagement is down on both, but especially Threads,” Paul Carter, chief executive of market researcher GWS Magnify, said in an interview Friday. “Part of it is seasonal, when people go on vacation. Then there are other factors, like the paywall and other platform alternatives like Hive and Mastodon.”
X had an average of 21 million daily active users in the U.S. in the first half of September, down from around 22 million in July but a slight uptick from 20 million in the last week of August, according to GWS Magnify, which is collecting data from U.S. mobile users.
Meanwhile, Threads’ daily active users have evaporated by two-thirds since the social-media platform’s July debut, down to 1.1 million in mid-September from 3.4 million.
Read more: Threads is seeing 25% fewer users than it did during its red-hot launch
If anything, Threads members are decamping for X. In early July, just 29.8% of them were also active on X. As of mid-September, that portion had grown to 54.2%.
Conversely, the share of X members who are also active on Threads peaked at 7.6% in July but plummeted to 2.7% in mid-September.
The growth of Threads has been stunted by a general lack of the type of compelling content that is available on Twitter, along with a reluctance among many Twitter users to make the jump, Abe Yousef, a senior insights analyst at market researcher Sensor Tower, said in an interview.
At the same time, alternatives to Twitter are gaining some ground — especially as X charges for blue checks, TweetDeck and possibly more. Bluesky, which bills itself as a “decentralized” social-media platform, had its biggest influx of new users, at more than 50,000, earlier this week after Musk made his threat about charging users, bringing its total membership to about 1.125 million.
While Bluesky’s daily active users reached 237,000 in mid-September, it is but a scant fraction of X’s user base.
X has 540 million monthly active users, according to a Musk tweet. During Meta’s second-quarter earnings call in late July, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company was “seeing more people coming back daily than I’d expected” to Threads.
