The Zuckerberg-Musk Rivalry Heats Up

The battle between social media titans Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk is heating up, with Zuckerberg’s company, Meta Platforms (META), recently launching microblogging site Threads. The site has gained significant traction, already boasting over 100 million users in just a few days. This success has seemingly irritated Musk, the owner of Twitter.

According to data-tracking website Quiver Quantitative, Threads reached the milestone of 100 million users early on Monday. In an updated report, analytics firm Similarweb highlighted that during the first two full days of Threads’ availability last week, web traffic to twitter.com dropped by 5% compared to the previous week. Additionally, when compared to the same two days from a year ago, Twitter traffic saw an 11% decrease, even without the impact of Threads.

Similarweb also revealed that Twitter’s traffic fell by 4% in June compared to the previous year. This decline was further supported by Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince, who noted in a tweet that Twitter traffic was “tanking.”

Furthermore, Similarweb identified a drop in user retention for Twitter, which it labeled as “a bad sign for app user loyalty.” The percentage of new users who continued using the Twitter app regularly after 30 days dropped from 19% in May 2022 to 16% in May 2023 on Android devices. Meanwhile, the loyalty of new Instagram users remained stable at around 40%.

Similarweb plans to monitor engagement closely, especially since Threads lacks certain features like hashtags that contributed to Twitter’s popularity.

Zuckerberg acknowledged the rapid growth of Threads’ user base in his own post, stating, “Threads reached 100 million sign-ups over the weekend. That’s mostly organic demand, and we haven’t even started promoting it heavily yet. It’s hard to believe it’s only been five days!”

The rivalry between Zuckerberg and Musk continues to escalate. Musk, who has previously suggested a cage match between himself and Zuckerberg, took to Twitter to taunt his rival once again. He even proposed a contest centered around a specific body part.

Twitter provided an automated emoji response to our request for comment, while a spokesperson from Meta was unavailable at the time of writing.

Conclusion

The ongoing rivalry between Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk is proving to be an intense competition. Zuckerberg’s Threads has already gathered an impressive user base, causing a noticeable decline in Twitter’s traffic. As this battle unfolds, the future engagement and effects of Threads will be closely monitored by industry experts.