In brief: Elon Musk's former Twitter platform X is struggling to add new daily active users (DAUs), and it's partly due to the competition it's facing from Meta's rival social media app Threads. X's number of DAUs in the second quarter of 2024 rose just 1.6% compared to the same period a year earlier.
According to figures seen by the Financial Times, the number of DAUs on X in the second quarter of this year was 251 million.
The Times notes that X's year-on-year growth rate has been falling since Musk took over in October 2022, reaching a low of 1.6% in Q2 2024 – X had 247 million users in the second quarter of last year. In Q2 2020, X's number of YoY DAUs jumped a massive 33.8%.
Part of the reason X is struggling to add significant numbers of new users stems from the competition it is facing from Threads. Meta's Twitter-like experience attracted over 100 million users within one week of launch, making it the fastest-growing app ever. Engagement has been down since then, though it was reported in February that the Threads app's daily downloads had doubled or even tripled X's over the previous three months.
Threads does still have a way to go before it catches X in terms of users. Mark Zuckerberg says his platform has 175 million monthly active users, whereas X claims to have 600 million MAUs. Threads is estimated to have just 38 million daily active users, too.
X has undergone plenty of changes since Musk took over, which include him eliminating the moderation teams and offering verified ticks to anyone willing to pay. He also managed to annoy departing advertisers by telling them to "go f*ck yourselves," though he later claimed this was more about freedom of speech.
X also has a problem with bots and fake stories. Late last year, the European Union identified the site as the social media platform with the highest ratio of misinformation/disinformation posts.