As X loses its CEO, daily usage is down and competition is growing

With the departure of X CEO Linda Yaccarino, which was announced Wednesday, the company that defined text-first social networking faces renewed competition.

Year-over-year, the Elon Musk-owned social network has seen its daily active user base decline by roughly 10% as of the second quarter of 2025, according to new data provided by app intelligence firm Sensor Tower. While X’s user base is still 65% larger than Meta’s Threads and 10 times larger than its next-biggest rival, Bluesky, X’s lasting victory in this space is not guaranteed.

On mobile devices, there’s already some indication that Threads is catching up.

New data from market intelligence provider Similarweb released this week indicates Threads is nearing X’s daily app users on mobile. In June 2025, Threads’ mobile app for iOS and Android saw 115.1 million daily active users, representing 127.8% year-over-year growth; X reached 132 million daily actives, as its year-over-year growth declined by 15.2%.

Overall, X is still larger than Threads thanks to its more prominent web presence.

X also has other advantages, which could make for an interesting fight between the tech giants. On X, user engagement and loyalty remain strong, despite the increased competition from Meta as well as open source social networking movements like Bluesky and Mastodon, and other startups. According to Sensor Tower’s data, X users spend an average of 31 minutes per day on the platform in the second quarter of 2025, which was nearly quadruple that of Threads, at 8 minutes per day.

Plus, nearly half (48%) of X’s global monthly app users in the quarter interacted with the platform on a daily basis, compared with 33% for Threads, the firm said.

But Threads can’t be counted out yet, simply because X is larger. Though Threads may have fewer daily active users than X, it’s been seeing stronger growth.

Over the past year, Threads’ global app daily active users were up 160% year-over-year, the Sensor Tower’s data shows, driven in part by the rollout of new features and functions, as well as by its ties to Meta’s other apps, like Facebook and Instagram, which serve as funnels.

Threads is also laser-focused on growing its ads ecosystem, which is the app’s only means of monetization for the time being. In April, Meta opened up Threads ads to its global advertisers, and the following month announced tests for video ads, as well.

The app has the advantage of being a part of Meta’s larger ads business, where its tools are already familiar to marketers and where it has the ability to tap into Meta’s nearly two decades of experience in maximizing ad revenues.

Under Yaccarino, X’s ad ecosystem recovered, but it’s been a volatile ride.

Advertisers in the media and entertainment, shopping, and gaming verticals through 2025 year-to-date
represent 25%, 22%, and 7% of total U.S. ad spend on X, respectively. Each of those categories have grown since 2022 when advertisers in the media and entertainment, shopping, and gaming verticals represented 20%, 14%, and 2%, respectively, Sensor Tower says.

Last year, top advertisers by U.S. ad spend were Samsung, Temu, State Farm, MGM, the NFL, Robinhood, Flutter, the NBA, Mihoyo, and Microsoft. This year, Apple, Google, Verizon, and Dell joined the lineup of top brands advertising on X.

New data from ad intelligence provider Guideline also noted that U.S. ad spending was up 62% year-over-year in the first half of 2025.

Advertising is not a zero-sum game, but the duopoly of Meta and Google has been hard to topple.

For Meta, the challenge was not whether it could turn a profit from a new social networking app, but whether it had the ability to create a new app that would gain traction with consumers. For years, it didn’t look like that would be the case. The company’s only successful new apps were those it acquired, like Instagram and WhatsApp.

Meanwhile, Meta’s prior attempts at building a new social networking app have almost entirely failed, leading to the shutdown of experimental apps like Tuned, Super, Move, Gaming, Hello, Neighborhood, Bulletin, Lasso, Moments, IGTV, Hobbi, Lifestage, Slingshot, Rooms, Rift, Notify, Paper, and others, including acquisitions like tbh.

That changed with Threads, which leveraged Instagram’s user base to bootstrap growth and now uses Facebook and Instagram’s apps to drive clicks.

Today, Threads has 350 million monthly active users, per Meta’s latest earnings report. X, a private company, is no longer required to share metrics publicly, but Musk has claimed previously that X has 600 million monthly active users.