X competitor Bluesky rocketed to the No. 1 spot on the Apple App Store’s US chart this week, as many users of Elon Musk’s platform said they were decamping in the wake of his significant role in the US presidential election.
Bluesky’s user base has doubled in the past 90 days — on Tuesday the company said it had gained 1 million new sign-ups in the past week alone, bringing it to more than 15 million total users.
The energy on X is markedly different: Musk spent months using the site to boost President-elect Donald Trump. In recent days, researchers have recorded surges in sexist language like “your body, my choice” on the site. And that’s on top of previous changes by Musk, like cutting moderators, restoring banned accounts, allowing racist and Nazi accounts and changing the platform’s verification system to boost anyone who was willing to pay, regardless of what they posted — all of which helped to tank the company’s core ad business.
A number of prominent journalists announced their exit, accordingly, from X to join Bluesky this week, including the Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel, the New York Times’ Mara Gay and former CNN anchor Don Lemon. UK newspaper The Guardian also said Wednesday that it will no longer post to X from its official channels, calling X “a toxic media platform,” although it did not specify which other platforms it plans to use to promote its work.
But while Bluesky may be having A Moment three years after its launch, any claims that it will kill X should be taken with a grain of salt.
As a private company, X doesn’t share user numbers. Recent third party estimates of user trends are mixed, although the consistent user growth the platform enjoyed prior to Musk’s takeover does appear to have been upended in the past two years. But — for better or, probably, worse — the site has so far weathered the creation of multiple other competitors, the reinstatement of White supremacists and the spread of racist conspiracy theories from Musk down without fading into irrelevance.
“X usage is at an all-time high and continues to surge,” X CEO Linda Yaccarino said in a post Wednesday. “To all of our users — of every interest, political party, and point of view — You will always have a place to engage and join the global conversation freely and safely.”
X users decamp post-election?
More than 115,000 US X users deactivated their accounts the day after the election, the largest single-day exit since Musk assumed control of the platform, according to digital intelligence platform Similarweb. And that included only users who deactivated through the website, not the mobile app.
But X also had its highest web traffic all year that same day, racking up 46.5 million visits on desktop alone, up 38% from the average of the preceding few months, Similarweb said. Bluesky also saw daily visits jump on Election Day and the day after to 1.2 million and 1.3 million, respectively, up from around 800,000 in the days before.
“Whether there will be a measurable decrease in the audience for X as the result of politics remains to be seen,” David Carr, Similarweb editor of insights, news and research, said in a blog post Tuesday. But, he added, “X’s recent daily peak in US traffic doesn’t make up for the erosion in audience the service has seen over the past couple of years since Musk took ownership of the service.”
Sensor Tower, another market intelligence firm, found that daily active app users and time spent on X jumped on November 5 and 6 compared to the prior 30 days. But by November 10, X daily active users were relatively flat compared to just before the election, whereas Bluesky saw a 28% jump in users in the same period.
Still, X has far more users than Bluesky, Sensor Tower noted. (Bluesky also remains much smaller than Meta’s Threads.)
A third app data analysis firm, Apptopia, also told CNN that activity on X jumped significantly ahead of the election. It said X’s daily active users peaked days later, on November 9, before tapering off slightly. On Bluesky, daily users more than doubled from-mid October to the post-election week.
Here’s the takeaway from all those numbers: X had a big jump in usage leading up to and on Election Day and the day after, but it appears to be waning. At the same time, Bluesky saw a surge after the election that looks to be continuing, although its overall user base is still relatively small.
Of course, lots of people flock to all kinds of media during and around an election week. And it’s worth remembering that we’ve seen troves of users swear off X before in the wake of earlier Musk incidents, only for many of them to come trickling back to the platform.
Nonetheless, anecdotally, some prominent social media users say they’re now seeing more engagement with their posts — the thing users on these sites typically prize above all else — on Bluesky, despite having larger followings on X.
Ed Zitron, founder of media relations firm EZPR, told CNN he and others have remained on X “because there is a critical mass of readers on there and there is a virality to the content you post.”
But, Zitron said, “with how Bluesky is scaling right now, I don’t see how (X) stays dominant,” adding that he has 90,000 followers on X but “the actual engagement doesn’t seem to matching up.”
New York Times journalist Mike Isaac had a similar remark in a Bluesky post Tuesday: “real disorienting to go from twitter — where i do a post to 200k followers and get five favs — over to bluesky where a post gets like 200 favs immediately.”
Musk’s return on $44 billion
But here’s the thing: Even if X was hemorrhaging users to Bluesky, there’s no sign Musk would care enough to do anything.
Although Musk said when he acquired the platform that he wanted it to be a “politically neutral” digital town square, X took a sharp turn toward the right under his leadership, even before he began championing Trump and his MAGA movement. Musk made X the first mainstream social platform to restore Trump’s account after he was widely banned following the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, prompting other platforms to do the same. In the run-up to the election, Musk spread false and misleading claims about Trump’s competitor, Vice President Kamala Harris. The platform also reportedly pushed political and pro-Trump content on users, whether they wanted it or not.
Now, X has become something of a hub for right-leaning social media users.
And by using the platform as a megaphone to promote Trump, Musk may have gotten the kind of return that he couldn’t even imagine when he bought Twitter for $44 billion two years ago: direct access to the US president.
Trump announced Tuesday night that Musk will take on an official role in his administration, becoming one of two people to lead a new “Department of Government Efficiency” alongside Vivek Ramaswamy. Musk also joined a call between Trump and Ukranian President Vladimir Zelensky immediately following the election, presumably to discuss the country’s war with Russia, in which Musk’s Starlink has played a key role as a communication tool.
And Musk’s personal wealth also jumped by $26.5 billion the day after the election, as investors hope his relationship with Trump will boost his companies’ fortunes.
That’s almost certainly worth plenty more than X’s declining ad revenue and any lost users in Musk’s mind.
–CNN’s Liam Reilly and Matt Egan contributed to this report.
