Andrew Hutchinson
Source: www.socialmediatoday.com, April 2024
Okay, I will preface this by noting that third party app data providers don’t have a full stream of info from the apps themselves, which often means that their numbers, while indicative, are not 100% accurate.
But that said, even if this is indicative, it’s a fairly significant shift.
According to the latest insight from Apptopia, Threads is seeing a steady rise in daily active users, and is now beating X in daily actives in the U.S. market.
As reported by Business Insider:
“So far in April, Threads has averaged an estimated 28 million daily active users, so people who have opened the app at least once in a 24-hour period […] X has averaged 22 million DAUs, a usage rate that’s 21% lower than Threads.”
To be clear, this is U.S. market data only. Overall, X claims to have over 250 million daily active users, with significant audiences in many other markets. But based on these figures, it does seem that Meta’s Twitter clone experiment, is catching on, which could be a bad sign for X moving forward.
Though the data is not all bad for X.
Apptopia also reports that while X’s daily active user count has been relatively flat, it is up on December, when X reportedly dropped to around 17m U.S. DAUs.
So maybe X is now stabilizing at a higher level, after the disruption caused by Musk’s various changes at the app. But even so, Threads may well be poised to take over. And while this is U.S. only, that could also point to expanded opportunities in other regions as well.
Meta leadership has stated several times that they believe Threads has the potential to become the next billion-user platform, though growth at the app has slowed from its meteoric launch numbers. Threads raced to 100 million members in record time, boosted by its affiliation with Instagram, and is now sitting on 130 million monthly actives, according the most recent update from Meta itself. X, for comparison, claims to have 550 monthly active users, so overall, Threads still has a long way to go to unseat the former bird app.
But maybe Meta is taking the right path, and its focus on building a more positive user experience will indeed see it unseat X as the real-time social platform of choice for the majority of users. Its resistance to real-time content does seem like a potential impediment, as well as its avoidance of political topics.
But maybe, despite this, Meta is on the right track, and Threads is shaping up as a better, more engaging platform for more users.
