With the departure of X CEO Linda Yaccarino, which was introduced Wednesday, the corporate that outlined text-first social networking faces renewed competitors.
Yr-over-year, the Elon Musk-owned social community has seen its every day energetic person base decline by roughly 10% as of the second quarter of 2025, in line with new knowledge supplied by app intelligence agency Sensor Tower. Whereas X’s person base remains to be 65% bigger than Meta’s Threads and 10 occasions bigger than its next-biggest rival, Bluesky, X’s lasting victory on this house is just not assured.
On cellular gadgets, there’s already some indication that Threads is catching up.
New knowledge from market intelligence supplier Similarweb launched this week signifies Threads is nearing X’s every day app customers on cellular. In June 2025, Threads’ cellular app for iOS and Android noticed 115.1 million every day energetic customers, representing 127.8% year-over-year progress; X reached 132 million every day actives, as its year-over-year progress declined by 15.2%.
Picture Credit:Similarweb
Total, X remains to be bigger than Threads because of its extra distinguished net presence.
X additionally has different benefits, which might make for an fascinating battle between the tech giants. On X, person engagement and loyalty stay robust, regardless of the elevated competitors from Meta in addition to open supply social networking actions like Bluesky and Mastodon, and different startups. In accordance with Sensor Tower’s knowledge, X customers spend a mean of 31 minutes per day on the platform within the second quarter of 2025, which was practically quadruple that of Threads, at 8 minutes per day.
Plus, practically half (48%) of X’s world month-to-month app customers within the quarter interacted with the platform each day, in contrast with 33% for Threads, the agency mentioned.
However Threads can’t be counted out but, just because X is bigger. Although Threads might have fewer every day energetic customers than X, it’s been seeing stronger progress.
Over the previous 12 months, Threads’ world app every day energetic customers have been up 160% year-over-year, the Sensor Tower’s knowledge exhibits, pushed partially by the rollout of recent options and capabilities, in addition to by its ties to Meta’s different apps, like Fb and Instagram, which function funnels.
Threads can be laser-focused on rising its adverts ecosystem, which is the app’s solely technique of monetization in the intervening time. In April, Meta opened up Threads adverts to its world advertisers, and the next month introduced assessments for video adverts, as properly.
The app has the benefit of being part of Meta’s bigger adverts enterprise, the place its instruments are already acquainted to entrepreneurs and the place it has the power to faucet into Meta’s practically twenty years of expertise in maximizing advert revenues.
Below Yaccarino, X’s advert ecosystem recovered, but it surely’s been a risky journey.
Advertisers within the media and leisure, procuring, and gaming verticals by way of 2025 year-to-daterepresent 25%, 22%, and seven% of complete U.S. advert spend on X, respectively. Every of these classes have grown since 2022 when advertisers within the media and leisure, procuring, and gaming verticals represented 20%, 14%, and a couple of%, respectively, Sensor Tower says.
Final 12 months, high advertisers by U.S. advert spend have been Samsung, Temu, State Farm, MGM, the NFL, Robinhood, Flutter, the NBA, Mihoyo, and Microsoft. This 12 months, Apple, Google, Verizon, and Dell joined the lineup of high manufacturers promoting on X.
New knowledge from advert intelligence supplier Guideline additionally famous that U.S. advert spending was up 62% year-over-year within the first half of 2025.
Promoting is just not a zero-sum recreation, however the duopoly of Meta and Google has been arduous to topple.
For Meta, the problem was not whether or not it might flip a revenue from a brand new social networking app, however whether or not it had the power to create a brand new app that may acquire traction with customers. For years, it didn’t appear to be that may be the case. The corporate’s solely profitable new apps have been these it acquired, like Instagram and WhatsApp.
In the meantime, Meta’s prior makes an attempt at constructing a brand new social networking app have nearly fully failed, resulting in the shutdown of experimental apps like Tuned, Tremendous, Transfer, Gaming, Hi there, Neighborhood, Bulletin, Lasso, Moments, IGTV, Hobbi, Lifestage, Slingshot, Rooms, Rift, Notify, Paper, and others, together with acquisitions like tbh.
That modified with Threads, which leveraged Instagram’s person base to bootstrap progress and now makes use of Fb and Instagram’s apps to drive clicks.
Immediately, Threads has 350 million month-to-month energetic customers, per Meta’s newest earnings report. X, a personal firm, is now not required to share metrics publicly, however Musk has claimed beforehand that X has 600 million month-to-month energetic customers.
