As Meta’s Threads celebrates first anniversary, will it now become a challenger to X?

Meta’s Threads, a social media platform built to capitalize on Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover in 2023, is celebrating its first anniversary with high ambitions to overtake X, as Twitter is now known.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg took to Threads on July 4 to announce that the app has more than 175 million monthly active users. The new milestone comes a few months after Threads reached 150 million active users in April, marking stable growth in 2024.

Despite Threads adding a significant amount of new users over the past three months, it’s still too early to say whether the app could one day become another X, which has proved to reign supreme in the cryptocurrency community.

Threads’ first anniversary: One year at a glance

Since the official launch on July 5, 2023, Threads has been slowly but steadily building an audience over the past year. The app initially saw a massive spike in new users at launch, mainly due to interest related to how it launched as a spinoff of Instagram.

The initial sharp surge of interest in Threads was quickly followed by a significant drop, as the app’s monthly active users subsequently dropped from above 100 million monthly users to below 50 million monthly users in August 2023, according to data from SimilarWeb.

According to the data, Threads’ traffic in June 2024 was only 9% higher compared to its launch in July 2023.

“Threads received a huge surge of interest following its launch on July 5, 2023, but building a regular and loyal audience has proven tougher,” SimilarWeb’s senior insights manager David Carr wrote in a post devoted to Threads’ one-year anniversary. He noted:

“Originally, the threads.net website served to encourage people to download the mobile app, offering no more than read-only access to member profiles. It wasn’t until August 2023 that Meta launched a more full-functioned web version of the service.”

Threads has nine times fewer monthly active users than X in the U.S.

Despite Threads’ reported monthly traffic showing promising figures compared to social media platforms like X, it’s still far from stepping on X’s toes.

According to Musk, X boasted 600 million monthly active users as of May 2024, about half of which used the platform daily.

While Threads’ overall 175 million monthly traffic figure might look too promising compared to X’s 600 million, there is still much room for growth.

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For example, according to SimilarWeb data, X has about nine times more monthly active users than Threads in the United States. In the United Kingdom, the gap in active users is not quite as big, at about 3.6 to 1.

At the same time, X’s user base has been somewhat shrinking. X’s users dropped about 9% in the U.S. and about 18% in the United Kingdom compared to last year.

The crypto community appears to remain loyal to X

According to some observations, Threads has managed to provide some perks compared to X, including better engagement and less bot activity.

However, according to community members like Quantum Economics founder Mati Greenspan, crypto people have continued to stick to X.

When asked about whether he observed the crypto community move away from X to Threads over the past year, Greenspan stated the following:

“To the best of my knowledge, nobody is shifting over to Threads. I’ve never signed up for Threads and apart from their big launch where everyone seemed to be wondering what it was about, I haven’t really heard about it since.”

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