X Faces Declining Usage and Rising Competition After CEO Exit

Following the announcement on Wednesday of X CEO Linda Yaccarino’s retirement, the business that pioneered text-first social networking is now up against new competition.

Year-over-year, the Elon Musk-owned social network has seen its daily active user population fall by nearly 10% as of the second quarter of 2025, according to fresh statistics given by app intelligence firm Sensor Tower. Even while X has ten times more users than its next-largest competitor, Bluesky, and 65% more users than Meta’s Threads, a sustained win in this market is not assured.

There are already some signs that Threads is catching up on mobile devices.

According to new data provided this week by market intelligence firm Similarweb, Threads is getting closer to X’s daily mobile app users. Threads’ iOS and Android mobile app had 115.1 million daily active users in June 2025, a 127.8% year-over-year increase; X’s year-over-year growth slowed to 132 million daily active users, a 15.2% decrease.

Because of its more noticeable online presence, X is still bigger than Threads overall.

A battle between the tech giants might be intriguing given X’s additional advantages. Despite the growing competition from Meta, open source social networking movements like Bluesky and Mastodon, and other startups, user engagement and loyalty are still high on X. In the second quarter of 2025, X users spent an average of 31 minutes a day on the platform, which was almost four times as long as Threads users, who spent 8 minutes a day on the network, according to data from Sensor Tower.

In addition, the company reported that almost half (48%) of X’s monthly global app users during the quarter engaged with the platform everyday, compared to 33% for Threads.

However, just because X is bigger, Threads cannot yet be discounted. Despite having fewer daily active users than X, Threads has been growing more rapidly.

According to the Sensor Tower’s data, Threads’ daily active users worldwide increased by 160% in the last year. This increase was fueled in part by the introduction of new features and functionalities as well as its connections to Meta’s other funneling platforms, such as Facebook and Instagram.

Additionally, Threads is concentrating on expanding its ad environment, which is now the only way to make money off of the app. Meta began experiments for video advertisements the following month after opening up Threads ads to its worldwide clients in April.

The app benefits from being a part of Meta’s bigger advertising business, as marketers are already familiar with its capabilities and can leverage Meta’s nearly two decades of experience in optimizing ad revenues.

Although it has been a bumpy ride, X’s ad ecology has recovered under Yaccarino.

Through 2025, advertisers in the commerce, gaming, and media and entertainment verticals had accounted for 25%, 22%, and 7% of all U.S. ad spend on X, respectively. Since 2022, when advertisers in the media and entertainment, retail, and gaming verticals accounted for 20%, 14%, and 2% of the total, respectively, each of those sectors has expanded, according to Sensor Tower.

Samsung, Temu, State Farm, MGM, the NFL, Robinhood, Flutter, the NBA, Mihoyo, and Microsoft were the top marketers in the United States by ad spend last year. The leading companies that now advertise on X include Apple, Google, Verizon, and Dell.

Additionally, new statistics from ad intelligence firm Guideline showed that in the first half of 2025, U.S. ad spending increased 62% year over year.

Although it’s not a zero-sum game, it’s proven difficult to break the Meta and Google duopoly.

The question for Meta was not whether it could make money with a new social networking app, but rather if it could develop a new program that would be popular with users. That didn’t appear to be the case for years. The only successful new apps the business released were those it purchased, such as WhatsApp and Instagram.

The shutdown of experimental apps like Tuned, Super, Move, Gaming, Hello, Neighbourhood, Bulletin, Lasso, Moments, IGTV, Hobbi, Lifestage, Slingshot, Rooms, Rift, Notify, Paper, and others, as well as acquisitions like tbh, have resulted from Meta’s previous attempts to create a new social networking app, which have nearly completely failed.

That changed with Threads, which now combines Facebook and Instagram apps to increase clicks after using Instagram’s user base to bootstrap growth.According to Meta’s most recent earnings report, there are currently 350 million monthly active users on Threads. Musk has previously asserted that X has 600 million monthly active users, although the private corporation is no longer obligated to disclose stats to the public.