A recent analysis highlights a significant shift in the competitive landscape of social media, with Meta's platform, Threads, now attracting more daily mobile users globally than X, the platform owned by Elon Musk's xAI. Since its introduction in July 2023, Threads quickly garnered attention, reaching 100 million sign-ups within its initial five days. While initially viewed by some as an imitation or rival to X, the platform has consistently achieved new user milestones, including surpassing 400 million monthly active users by August 2025 and 150 million daily active users by October 2025, according to Meta's reports.
Further insights from Similarweb reinforce this trend, indicating that as of January 7th, Threads recorded 141.5 million daily active mobile users, overshadowing X's 125 million. This growing user engagement for Threads is attributed to several factors, such as strategic cross-promotion across Meta's other popular applications like Facebook and Instagram, alongside the introduction of new features designed to enhance user experience. These include a focus on content creators, new community functionalities, direct messaging capabilities, and disappearing posts, with even game testing contributing to its expansion. Conversely, X has observed a steady decline in its mobile daily active users over the past year, despite maintaining dominance in web-based daily active users, where Threads is also seeing an upward trend, albeit from a lower base.
This impressive growth for Threads comes at a pivotal time for Meta, as the company anticipates reporting its fourth-quarter financial results. Analysts project a rise in both earnings per share and revenue compared to the previous year's fourth quarter, continuing a streak of outperforming estimates. The success of Threads, coupled with a rebound in advertising revenue across Meta's established platforms, positions the company strongly. While the data on Threads' and X's user figures remains an estimate, the potential for Meta to leverage Threads' increasing popularity for monetization will be a key point of interest in its upcoming earnings announcement.
This development underscores the dynamic nature of the digital world, where innovation and strategic adaptation are crucial for sustained engagement and growth. It illustrates how competition can drive platforms to evolve, offering users enhanced experiences and fostering new avenues for connection and expression. The continuous pursuit of improvement and user-centric features remains essential for any platform striving to lead in the fast-paced realm of social media.