One of the most anticipated changing of the guard moments set to happen in 2026, based on each app’s current trajectory, is that Meta’s Twitter clone Threads is likely to overtake the app formerly known as Twitter, X, in terms of active users.
Which would mark a major shift in the social media landscape, a variation from the established power base within the sector, and would essentially be the final line in the epitaph of what Twitter used to be.
And according to some stats at least, it’s already happened, with Similarweb publishing data which suggests that Threads has superseded X in daily active users, and is now clearly separating itself from the Elon Musk-owned app.
As you can see in this chart, according to Similarweb’s insights, Threads actually moved ahead of X in daily active users in September last year, and has since continued to increase its lead, despite X seeing some spikes around major news events.
A significant win for Threads has been an increase in sports leagues and celebrities posting to the app, which is what Twitter was once renowned for, while real-time event coverage is also improving on Threads, as it refines its algorithms, and looks to amplify more newsworthy content.
X, meanwhile, is leaning more and more into its Grok chatbot as a key component, which has seen AI posts taking over people’s feeds. That may be the cause of the separation here, though it is also worth digging into the nuance of this data, in order to get a true understanding of each app’s relative performance.
First off, this chart represents daily active users, not monthly, and the latter is the more commonly used comparative measure of performance in social media circles. At present, Threads has officially claimed to have 400 million monthly actives, while X claims 600 million, though I have many questions about X’s official counts.
For years, before Elon Musk purchased the app, Twitter had struggled to grow its user base, reaching a peak of 336 million monthly active users in Q1 2018. Twitter was so frustrated by its stagnant growth that it changed its categorization to “News” on the App Store, instead of “Social Media,” in order to avoid negative comparison to Facebook, which had continued to add millions more users every quarter, hurting Twitter’s market standing (note: Twitter couldn’t switch to “News” on Android because Google restricts apps that are primarily UGC from this segment).
When Elon Musk took over Twitter in 2022, the news coverage around Musk’s takeover had seemingly boosted interest in the app, taking it up to 368 million MAU, though as you may recall, Musk himself, in an effort to get out of his initial Twitter offer, speculated that at least 20% of these users were bots, which he pledged to eradicate as a priority. Musk has since claimed several times that he has fixed the bot problem in the app.
Yet, for that to be true, he would have also had to cut 20% of its user count, which would mean that, in correcting for this, X would have started from a base of around 294 million real MAU in 2022.
Yet, in July 2023, less than a year after taking the reigns at the app, Musk claimed that X had reached a new record of 540 million MAU.
So, somehow, X had almost doubled Twitter’s long-standing user count (accounting for bot removals), and that number has since ballooned to 600 million.
Yet, at the same time, official documentation from X shows that its usage has decreased, and third-party reports, like these notes from Similarweb, continue to also show a decline in usage.
Because X is no longer a publicly listed company, X’s user counts are not auditable, so it can pretty much say whatever it wants, but I don’t believe that X is reaching record highs, especially if its claims of addressing bot activity have any substance.
Which leads to another point of contention with these numbers, because Similarweb doesn’t have access to X’s internal data either, so there’s no way that these figures are 100% accurate.
Similarweb’s data is based on estimates, extrapolated from its available pool of data resources.
As explained by Similarweb:
“Our machine learning algorithms are fed by millions of websites’ and apps’ first-party analytics, both proprietary and sourced through partners.”
So Similarweb has access to a wide range of sources, both through direct users and partners, which it then uses for its estimates, through its own methodology, to come up with its numbers.
As such, these stats are exactly that, estimates, and are not definitive, while this chart also doesn’t include web usage, in which X clearly beats Threads.
Does that mean that X is still beating Threads in daily active users? I don’t know, and no one outside of X really does. And X’s team keeps claiming record downloads, and steady increases in usage, so maybe, accounting for all of this, the chart above may not be representative.
Which brings me to the next key question: Does this really matter?
Sure, in the broader scheme of things, from a wider industry perspective, the fact that Threads may have superseded X as the main real-time, text-based platform of choice is big news, but for marketers looking to maximize their efforts, the only really relevant question is where your target audience is active. If X has fewer users overall, but your audience is there, then that should be your priority, and while the broader analysis suggests, increasingly, that this probably isn’t the case, that specific audience is who you need to be paying attention to.
The only proviso I would add to this is that X’s head of product Nikita Bier recently revealed that the average X user only views 20-30 posts in the app each day.
Which seems very low. Most people would be skimming through around 20 posts in less than a minute, so based on this, not many people, if they are in your target audience, are very active in the app.
The bottom line is that this is all correlating data based on what we can see, because X doesn’t share much internal insight.
But either way, it does seem that Threads is on track to conquer X sometime this year.
