In the days since its launch, Mark Zuckerberg's Twitter challenger Threads has positioned itself as a real competitor to Elon Musk's Twitter. It has become the fastest-growing app in history, boasting more than 100 million users just five days after its launch.
Amid Threads' strong start, some, like Cloudfare CEO Matthew Prince, have noted that Twitter's traffic has begun to take a bit of a dive, suggesting that users might be beginning to migrate away from the platform.
Musk -- and Twitter's new CEO Linda Yaccarino -- disagree.
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Yaccarino -- in a dig at Threads -- tweeted Monday that Twitter had its "largest usage day since February" last week.
"There's only ONE Twitter," she added. "You know it. I know it."
Musk -- who announced that Yaccarino would be stepping into his CEO shoes in May -- jumped into the conversation, adding that, in "cumulative user-seconds per day of phone screentime," Twitter "hit an all-time record this week."
Cumulative user-seconds per day of phone screentime, as reported by iOS & Android, is hardest to game. I think we may hit an all-time record this week.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 10, 2023
Similarweb, a website analytics tracker, meanwhile, found that "in the first two full days that Threads was generally available, web traffic to twitter.com was down 5% compared with the same days of the previous week."
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Similarweb also noted that, year-over-year, Twitter's traffic was down 11% on those same days, adding that "Twitter traffic has experienced an overall decline even in the absence of Threads and was down 4% year-over-year in June."
Twitter traffic tanking. https://t.co/KSIXqNsu40 pic.twitter.com/mLlbuXVR6r
— Matthew Prince 🌥 (@eastdakota) July 9, 2023
But Twitter's problems, according to Similarweb, go beyond traffic. User retention on the platform has also fallen, indicating a "bad sign for app user loyalty."
"On Android, the percentage of new users who are continuing to regularly use the Twitter app after 30 days has dropped from 19% in May 2022 to 16% in May 2023," the company wrote. "In contrast, the loyalty of new Instagram users has held steady at about 40%.
The final earnings report released by Twitter in July 2022 before its purchase by Musk indicated that Twitter had a little less than 240 million monetizable daily active users.
Musk explained that his new measurement -- cumulative user seconds per day of phone screen time -- is harder to manipulate than the old one.
"Troll farms can still manipulate screentime via humans with lots of phones, but that is >100 times more expensive than bots," he tweeted.
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