Say what you will about the social media platform Threads—for instance that its rushed rollout in 2023 felt like a rather cynical ploy by Meta to exploit the public’s aversion to X owner Elon Musk, and that it’s not clear who Threads is for in the first place—but hey: a favorable report from Similarweb is making it look more popular than its main competitor, Elon Musk’s X.
Last year, according to a report from the analytics company Similarweb, Threads briefly edged out X in mobile daily active users. Then the two platforms’ performance by this metric more or less converged for a while, before Threads achieved a higher number of daily active users for the month of October, also according to Similarweb. Now, the latest report from Similarweb (Similarweb publishes a lot of these reports), gives Threads a still healthier lead in daily active iOS and Android users. Threads had achieved 141.5 million daily active users as of about two weeks ago, while X’s Android and iOS apps have only 125 million daily active users.
X is still far and away the more popular platform for web-based users, an important claim that hints at wider relevance. In September of last year, according to Forbes, there were 140.7 million daily active users on X.com, while only a minuscule 7.7 million daily active users materialized on the Threads website.
It should be noted that unlike X—and fellow X clone Bluesky, for that matter—Threads is a subsidiary of a more popular social media app than any of these: Instagram. Meta funnels Instagram users to Threads, and vice versa, a tactic that pretty obviously boosts the power levels of both platforms. And that’s not to mention that they both exist under the aegis of Facebook.
And while Threads’ ascent past X reflects a long term upward trend, not a short-term spike, it’s also worth mentioning that this shift comes amid a rather nasty scandal in which a chatbot operated by X’s parent company was recently running amok on the platform, generating non-consensual deepfake bikini photos of people, including minors in some cases.
Bluesky also experienced a spike in downloads at the height of the controversy according to a report from the data company Appfigures as quoted by TechCrunch—at one point experiencing a 50% boost in daily downloads from the period before its competitor’s deepfake crisis.
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