The number of people using X every day is falling, more than a year after tech billionaire Elon Musk bought the app formerly known as Twitter.
Data from two research firms and figures released by Musk and X suggest a worsening situation for X by some metrics. Musk has touted it as the world’s “town square,” but in terms of users it still lags far behind video-focused social media rivals like Instagram and TikTok.
In February, X had 27 million daily active users of its mobile app in the US, down 18% from a year earlier, according to Sensor Tower, a market intelligence firm based in San Francisco. The US user base has been flat or down every month since November 2022, Musk’s first full month of ownership of the app, and is down 23% overall since then, Sensor Tower said.
The numbers were almost as bad worldwide, as daily active users on the mobile app fell to 174 million in February, down 15% from a year earlier, the firm said. The worldwide user base has been flat or declining every month during Musk’s early tenure except for one, when it rose slightly in October and then began to decline again, according to Sensor Tower.
Other social media apps saw modest growth in their worldwide user bases during the same period, according to the research, with Snapchat growing 8.8%, Instagram 5.3%, Facebook 1.5% and TikTok 0.5%. All of these apps suffered declines during that period in the US, but none as large as the drop in X.
X had “the most material decline in active users compared to its peers,” Abe Yousef, a senior insights analyst at Sensor Tower, wrote in a research report.
“This decline in active users of X mobile apps may have been caused by user frustration with blatant content, general platform technical issues, and the growing threat of short-form video platforms,” he wrote.
Under Musk’s ownership, X has eased content moderation rules that previously restricted hateful content, such as white supremacist images, and Musk has welcomed back to the platform some users that old Twitter management had banned. In December, he reinstated the accounts of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and his website Infowars and then held an audio-only public event with Jones.
X said in a post Monday that the worldwide number is higher than Sensor Tower data shows, with 250 million people using X every day worldwide. That would still be down from when Musk bought the app. Musk said in 2022, by the time he completed the acquisition in late October, Twitter had about 258 million “earnable daily active users,” the company’s metric at the time.
X did not respond to a request for additional information. It didn’t say how it determines who counts as an active user — a metric that might seem straightforward by its name, but that tech platforms define differently.
On a monthly basis, X has 550 million people using it, according to the company. This figure represents an increase of 1.5% since July, when Musk said X had 542 million monthly users.
Sensor Tower defines a daily active user as someone who “recorded a session of at least two seconds in length, once that day.” It says its data comes from a panel of consumers who provide access to their information in exchange for using other apps, including apps that track screen time.
Advertisers have also moved away from X, Sensor Tower said, with 75 of the top 100 US advertisers on X by October 2022 ceasing ad spend on it. The exodus grew late last year after Musk publicly embraced an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory and told advertisers at a conference in New York: “Go yourself.”
In recent days, Musk has been asking his 177 million followers on X to get more people on the platform. On Sunday, he posted instructions on how to share posts with friends, a basic social media function.
“Please send links from this platform to your friends who are still being cheated by legacy media!” he wrote in a separate post on Sunday.
Musk has also shifted the platform’s business model from being almost entirely ad-supported to one that also has four subscription tiers, from free to a Premium+ service that starts at $16 a month.
Sensor Tower said that, according to its research, X’s revenue from in-app purchases last month was about $9.5 million, including X subscriptions and payments to creators.
“This still remains just a fraction of the revenue the company was previously generating from advertising in its last year as a public entity,” Yousef wrote. Twitter in July 2022 reported $1.18 billion in revenue for the previous three months.
X is helped by the lack of a clear text-based social media alternative. Threads, a competitor launched by Instagram and its parent company Meta, had 1.6 million daily active mobile users in the US, according to Sensor Tower, and 14 million worldwide.
Threads has a huge potential advantage over other new apps because it’s tightly integrated with Instagram — Instagram users can see Threads posts in their feeds and create accounts relatively easily. That has translated into a huge disparity in downloads, according to a second research firm, Boston-based Apptopia, which said Threads beat X in downloads worldwide by an 8-to-1 ratio in February.
Downloads were even more skewed in the US in February, with Threads getting about 16 downloads for every download of X, Apptopia said.
“For microblogging platforms, X had the dominant market share of app downloads until the launch of Threads,” Tom Grant, vice president of research at Apptopia, wrote in an email. “It completely turned the market share on its head.”
There were 2.9 million downloads of X in Sh. Threads had 46.2 million downloads last month, Apptopia said.
Threads has recently charted in several app store rankings, topping Apple’s free apps chart on Sunday and staying in the Top 4 for most of this week. X ranked 34th in the Apple app store on Sunday and 30th on Friday. On Friday, Threads ranked No. 7 on the Google Play Store and X ranked No. 43.
But so far, the downloads haven’t translated into sustainable growth for Threads, according to Sensor Tower. Another X competitor, Bluesky, was even smaller, with 195,000 daily active mobile users in the US in February, according to the research firm.
In its own summary of the data published on Monday, X said that “1.7 million people join X every day.” That number is roughly three times the number of daily X downloads worldwide, according to Apptopia, and suggests that X is growing at a rate of nearly 10% per month – much faster than any other source.
