The departure of X CEO Linda Yaccarino announced on Wednesday, and the company that text-first social networking defined the company faced new competition.
New data provided by App Intelligence Firm Sensor Tower shows that, compared to the previous year, Elon Musk-owned social networks have seen their daily active user base fall by around 10% as of the second quarter of 2025. X's user base is 65% larger than the threads in Meta and 10 times larger than its next biggest rival, Bluesky, but X's lasting victory in this space is not guaranteed.
On mobile devices, it shows that threads are catching up.
New data from the Market Intelligence Provider Simarweb, released this week, shows that threads are approaching X's daily app users on mobile. In June 2025, Threads mobile app for iOS and Android had 115.1 million active users, representing 127.8% growth from the previous year. X reached 132 million active as its growth fell 15.2% year-over-year.
Image credit: SirialWeb
Overall, X is still bigger than threads thanks to its more pronounced web presence.
X also has other advantages, which could be an interesting battle among the tech giants. With X, despite growing competition with the meta and the moves of open source social networking like Bluesky, Mastodon and other startups, user engagement and loyalty remains strong. According to Sensor Tower data, X users averaged 31 minutes a day on the platform in the second quarter of 2025.
Additionally, almost half (48%) of X's global monthly app users in the Quarter interacted with the platform on a daily basis, compared to 33% of threads.
However, the threads still don't count just because x is large. Threads may have fewer daily active users than X, but they are growing stronger.
Over the past year, daily active users of Threads' global apps have increased by 160% year-on-year. Sensor Tower data is driven in part by new features and functionality rollouts, and connections with other apps in the meta, such as Facebook and Instagram, that act as funnels.
Threads also focus on lasers on the growth of the advertising ecosystem. This is the only way to monetize your app for the time being. In April, Meta opened a thread ad for global advertisers and announced tests of video ads the following month.
This app has the advantage of being part of Meta's large advertising business. There, the tool is already familiar to marketers and can leverage nearly 20 years of experience maximizing advertising revenue.
Under Yaccarino, the X's AD ecosystem recovered, but it was a volatile ride.
Advertisers in media and entertainment, shopping and gaming industries until 2025
X represents 25%, 22% and 7% of total ad spend in US advertising. According to Sensor Tower, each of these categories has grown since 2022, when media and entertainment, shopping and gaming verticals were 20%, 14% and 2%, respectively.
Last year, the top advertisers for US ads were Samsung, Temu, State Farm, MGM, NFL, Robinhood, Flutter, NBA, Mihoyo and Microsoft. This year, Apple, Google, Verizon and Dell joined the lineup of top brands of advertising at X.
New data from AD Intelligence Provider guidelines also pointed to a 62% increase in US advertising spending in the first half of 2025 compared to the previous year.
Ads are not zero-sum games, but meta and Google replicas are hard to fall over.
For Meta, the challenge wasn't whether they could change profits from new social networking apps, but whether they had the ability to create new apps that would gain traction with consumers. For years it didn't seem to be the case. The company's only successful new apps were those it acquired, such as Instagram and WhatsApp.
Meanwhile, Meta's previous attempts to build a new social networking app have almost completely failed, leading to the closure of experimental apps such as tuning, super, moving, games, hello, neighborhood, breaking news, instant, IGTV, hobby, lifetage, slingshot, room, lift, TBH and more.
This changed with threads that leveraged the Instagram user base to leverage Bootstrap Growth and used Facebook and Instagram apps to drive clicks.
Today, the thread has 350 million active users, following Meta's latest revenue report. While X, a private company, no longer has to publicly share metrics, Musk previously claims that X has 600 million active users per month.