Twitter’s Rebranding To X Caused Decline In Rankings And Active Users

X, formerly Twitter, underwent a number of changes after being acquired by tech billionaire and SpaceX founder Elon Musk last year. The latest one was renaming the micro-blogging platform from Twitter to X and changing the “iconic” bird logo in favour of an “X” logo. The platform witnessed not a decrease in the number of downloads but saw a decline in weekly active users too, the media has reported. There was a four per cent decline in X’s weekly active users in the weeks that followed the rebranding of Twitter, says a report by TechCrunch that quoted data from SensorTower.

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As per Eric Seufert of Mobile Dev Memo, Twitter witnessed a drastic fall in its “Top Downloaded” chart position across both Android and iOS devices, following Twitter’s renaming to X. However, the installs for the Twitter Lite app, which has been designed for emerging markets, increased after the name change.

However, the report (again quoting Sensor Tower) noted that the company’s revenue surprisingly increased after the rebranding and between August 6 to August 20, the company’s revenue substantially jumped by ~25 per cent, primarily driven by revenue from iOS (up 24 per cent).

This comes amid recent reports that say a majority of followers that Musk has, are fake. A significant number of Musk’s 153 million followers are fake and they may be inactive and new accounts. According to a report by Mashable, out of the more than 153 million followers Musk has, about 42 per cent or more than 65.3 million accounts have zero followers. The report mentioned and reviewed data collected by third-party researcher Travis Brown.

X’s rival Instagram Threads is also struggling to retain its users after an initial high and launch. The company lost more than 75 per cent of its daily active users (DAUs) on Android. According to analytics firm Similarweb, the Instagram Threads app for Android peaked at 49.3 million daily active users on July 7, globally. Now, the app has lost 79 per cent of its DAUs. As on August 7, the app’s DAUs were down to 10.3 million.