Similarweb: U.S. Traffic to Bluesky and Threads Increases as X Slides ⇥ theguardian.com

Hannah Murphy and John Burn-Murdoch, Financial Times:

Since election day, app usage of Bluesky in the US and UK skyrocketed by almost 300 per cent to 3.5mn daily users, according to data from research group Similarweb. The site was boosted as academics, journalists and left-leaning politicians abandoned X, whose billionaire owner is a prominent supporter of the president-elect.

Prior to November 5, Threads had five times more daily active users in the US than Bluesky, which has just 20 full-time staff and was initially funded by Twitter when Jack Dorsey was its chief executive. Now, Threads is only 1.5 times larger than its rival, Similarweb said.

Raphael Boyd, the Guardian:

A mass departure from Elon Musk’s X has led to the site losing about 2.7 million active Apple and Android users in the US in two months, with its rival social media platform Bluesky gaining nearly 2.5 million over the same period.

[…]

According to the digital market intelligence company Similarweb, the number of daily active US users on X has dropped by 8.4% since early October, from 32.3 million to 29.6 million.

These are interesting numbers from a questionable source. I wanted to check the work of Similarweb against user numbers reported by any tech company but, unsurprisingly, I could not find any overlap. Such figures would be both redundant if they were accurate and embarrassing if they were not.

Twitter stopped reporting monthly active users in early 2019 owing to steady declining numbers. In its then-most-recent figures, Twitter claimed between 66 and 69 million monthly active U.S. users — over twice as many as Similarweb reports X having now. However, despite their superficial similarity, the methodologies of these companies are likely very different; I could not find any pre-Musk monthly active user statistics for Twitter as reported by Similarweb for comparison. Also, do note the numbers in the first article — the one from the Times — are daily active users, not monthly.

These figures are clearly derived from something and not just made up. Even so, I would not read into them too much. But here is a bizarre possibility: perhaps all these traffic stats really are comparable. Maybe X has lost half its U.S. user base in the past five years, and services which did not exist then are growing fast. And even if Bluesky and Threads do not have as large a user base as X, it does not necessarily mean they are not meaningful. A perfect case study is Twitter itself, which has never had a user base like Facebook or Instagram. Even so, Twitter punched above its weight and swayed public conversation in a way Facebook rarely has, for better and worse.