User Growth of Social Media Platform X Stalls Amidst Controversy and Competition

TapTechNews July 10th news, according to the Financial Times report, the user growth of the social media platform X has stalled, which is related to the controversial leadership style of the platform's owner, Elon Musk, and the competition from Meta's emerging platform Threads.

Previously undisclosed data shows that the global daily active user count of X in the second quarter of this year is 251 million, only increasing by 1.6% compared to the same period last year. This forms a sharp contrast to the double-digit growth that the platform maintained in the years before Musk's acquisition. Musk privatized X in October 2022 at a price of 44 billion US dollars (TapTechNews note: currently about 320.425 billion yuan).

Elon Musk is quite controversial as the leader of X. He renamed the platform shortly after the acquisition. Since Musk took over X, the platform has led to a significant loss of advertisers due to its absolutist view of freedom of speech stance and the removal of most content moderators.

X also faces competition from new platforms. The social media giant Meta launched a platform named Threads last year, aiming to challenge the status of X. Mark Zuckerberg, Meta's chief executive, disclosed that the monthly active user count of Threads has increased to 175 million. In contrast, X claims to have 600 million monthly active users. However, the analytics firm SensorTower estimates that the daily active user count of Threads is only 38 million, meaning that users open the application less frequently than other social media platforms.

Threads attracted a large number of initial users when it was launched last July, becoming the fastest-growing application ever, with 100 million people registering in the first week. However, the high usage rate of this platform did not last long and then significantly declined. Zuckerberg admitted in the earnings call in February this year that Threads was one of the products that the company was ill-prepared when it was launched.

However, thanks to the expansion to the EU market in December last year and the settlement of celebrities like Taylor Swift, the user count of Threads has steadily increased since last autumn. Similarweb data shows that Threads also benefits from the post promotion on the sister application Instagram, which provides about two-thirds of its web traffic.