Musk shared a graph that showed the latest count as over 541 million.
“X monthly users reach a new high in 2023,” he tweeted, adding that these numbers are after removal of a vast number of bots. Social media companies usually report their ‘active’ monthly users but Musk’s data was missing the (important?) word.
Twitter reported that it had 229 million monthly active users in May 2022 and in November last year, Musk claimed that X had 259.4 million daily active users.
Threads under ‘threat’?
The development comes at a time when its direct competitor Threads is looking to find ways to retain its users. A report claimed that Threads registered a decline and daily active users dropped from 49 million to 23.6 million in about two weeks after it was launched.
Earlier this week, a separate report claimed that Threads was working on “retention-driving hooks”, which are necessarily new features that may help the platform retain users. According to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the drop-off in active users count was “normal” and he expects retention to grow as the company adds more features to the app.
“Obviously, if you have more than 100 million people sign up, ideally it would be awesome if all of them or even half of them stuck around. We’re not there yet,” he said.
‘X’ comes to iPhones
The monthly users count came as Twitter is undergoing a rebranding on smartphones. Twitter became X on the web, then the change came to Android and now iPhones users are seeing the blue bird logo changing to ‘X’. However, the name of the app on the App Store remains ‘Twitter’.
It is pointed out that Apple makes it mandatory for apps to have at least two letters in their names, therefore, the name of the app is not changed on the App Store..