social network the sky is blue It once again benefited from Elon Musk’s missteps with the X Network, formerly known as Twitter. According to a new analysis of Bluesky’s web traffic and mobile app usage, potential X competitor hit a daily active user record after Musk announced it would start charging all X users a small monthly fee to use its services.
Musk made the announcement during a live-streamed event on September 18, where the X owner explained that a paid subscription would be necessary to fight “huge armies of bots” on the platform. Meanwhile, it seems that X users did not like this news, as it led to a rise in the numbers of Bluesky’s competitors.
Related Report from Mashable He noted that Bluesky saw record new sign-ups after Musk announced his plans to charge X users, noting that Bluesky saw a total of 53,585 new sign-ups by the end of the day on Tuesday, September 19. This number equates to 5% of the platform’s entire user base of approximately 1.13 million accounts.
Analytics company Sameweb is now backing up These findings combined with its latest report that Bluesky’s Android app saw half a million daily active users on the day of Musk’s announcement, September 18, and web traffic soared even more.
On Android, the daily active users metric was up 20.6% from the previous day, but he doesn’t have an estimate for iOS usage at the moment, but only says he expects the trend to be similar.
Meanwhile, Bluesky web app It saw over 775,000 visitors per day, a 30% increase from the previous day. Bluesky had over 1 million daily visitors on September 19 and nearly that number in September. That number is more than the number of users Bluesky saw on July 1, 2023 — 811,000 — after another controversy when the service imposed temporary rate caps on the number of tweets users could view, Slikeweb said.
This rush of new users has prompted Bluesky Stop new user registrations For some time the website collapsed under the influx of traffic.
What’s interesting about Sameweb’s results is that Bluesky seems to benefit when X stumbles, but the same isn’t necessarily true of other potential Twitter competitors, like Instagram Threads or Mastodon. Twitter’s new meta version saw 8.3 million daily active users on September 18, but that was roughly in line with the number it saw the day before, the company found — and still far from peak usage shortly after launch.
Since Bluesky remains invite-only, the spike in usage this week could have been higher had it opened its doors to anyone interested in joining.
This now makes for many missed opportunities where Bluesky could have profited from X’s blunders, from when Musk acquired Twitter to the mess with the rolling verification system to the more recent price caps to Users.
Bluesky seems completely uninterested in taking advantage of these moments to grow its user base, which has just surpassed 1 million — a small slice of what X has now.
Musk announced that X has 550 million monthly active users, a much larger number than Bluesky or other competitors, such as Threads or Mastodon. The former is estimated to have 135 million monthly active users globally, according to data from market intelligence firm data.ai. Mastodon, meanwhile, Publish Public monthly active user numbers, which have now reached 1.7 million.
Although it is the largest microblogging network, X may be a little worried about its market position after its rebranding. The company recently added “formerly Twitter” to its App Store description to help boost its rankings in App Store search. “Formerly Twitter” has replaced the previous tagline “Light Your Glory,” which is unlikely to help its rankings.
The
Updated 9/22/23 at 3:30pm ET using the latest data provided by Sameweb.