Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino tweeted on Monday that the social media site last week “had our largest usage day since February” despite reports that traffic has been cratering as users move over to Meta’s new Threads app.
“There’s only ONE Twitter. You know it. I know it,” Yaccarino wrote in her tweet.
Yaccarino’s post appeared to take a jab at Threads, which launched on Wednesday and has already banked more than 100 million users.
Musk — who stepped down from the chief executive position last month — replied with: “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.”
If Yaccarino defines “usage” as screentime, her post suggests that Twitter’s users are spending more time on the app — not that Twitter is gaining in popularity.
Twitter has more than 368 million monthly active users, according to Statista.
Threads, meanwhile, has been billed as the “Twitter killer,” and has been promoted by boss Mark Zuckerberg as a kinder, gentler version of its Musk-owned rival.
“The goal is to keep it friendly as it expands. I think it’s possible and will ultimately be the key to its success,” he wrote on Threads.
“That’s one reason why Twitter never succeeded as much as I think it should have, and we want to do it differently,” Zuckerberg added.
Instagram boss Adam Mosseri has denied claims that Threads will mimic Twitter, though Musk has already threatened to sue Meta for creating a copycat platform.
Users access Threads through their Instagram accounts, and many are attributing the new app’s integration with the beloved photo-sharing site as reason for its success.
Instagram has more than 2 billion monthly active users, posing a real threat to Twitter’s audience.
Just days before Yaccarino claimed Twitter’s traffic was the best it’s been since February, Cloudfare’s head of cybersecurity Matthew Prince shared a graph on both his Twitter and Threads account that painted a very different picture.
The chart, which Prince posted on Sunday, showed a steep decline in Twitter’s traffic since January.
Prince’s data dovetails with figures released by Similarweb, the web analytics company that said web traffic to Twitter was down by 5% over the course of the first 48 hours after Threads went online.
Twitter’s web traffic is down 11% compared to the same period last year, Similarweb reported.
Thread’s success has put Musk on the defense, escalating the rivalry between himself and Zuckerberg since the Big Tech bosses agreed to a real-life mixed martial arts cage match in Las Vegas last month.
Most recently, Musk, 52, challenged his 39-year-old nemesis to a “d–k measuring contest” in a bizarre tweet.
The father-of-10 made the proposition just hours after calling the Facebook co-founder a “cuck.”
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