Bluesky’s user base has doubled in the last 90 days. Is it a mass exodus from X?

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CNN
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X-rival Bluesky shot to No. 1 on the Apple App Store’s US charts this week as many users of Elon Musk’s platform said they would give up in the wake of his prominent role in the US presidential election.

Bluesky’s user base has doubled in the last 90 days – on Tuesday, the company announced that it had gained 1 million new signups in the past week alone, bringing its total user count to over 15 million.

The energy on X is noticeably different: Musk used the site for months to boost President-elect Donald Trump. In recent days, researchers have noted a rise in sexist language such as “Your body, my choice” on the site. And that’s in addition to Musk’s previous changes, such as deleting moderators, reinstating banned accounts, allowing racist and Nazi accounts, and changing the platform’s verification system to promote anyone willing to pay , regardless of what he posted – all of which contributed to fueling the company’s core advertising business.

A number of prominent journalists accordingly announced their departure from X to join Bluesky this week, including the Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel Mara Gay of The New York Times and former CNN anchor Don Lemon. The British newspaper The Guardian also announced on Wednesday that it would no longer be broadcasting through its official channels

But while Bluesky may have it One moment Three years after its introduction any claims that it will kill X should be taken with caution.

As a private company, X does not disclose user numbers. Recent third-party estimates of user trends are mixed, although the consistent user growth the platform was seeing before Musk’s acquisition appears to have been reversed over the past two years. But — for better and probably for worse — the site has so far weathered the creation of several other competitors, the reinstatement of white supremacists, and the spread of racist conspiracy theories from Musk on down without sinking into irrelevance.

“X usage is at an all-time high and continues to rise,” X CEO Linda Yaccarino said in a post Wednesday. “To all our users – regardless of interests, political party or viewpoint: you will always have a place where you can freely and safely engage and participate in the global conversation.”

More than 115,000 US users And that only included users who opted out via the website, not the mobile app.

But X also had the highest web traffic all year round According to Similarweb, 46.5 million visits were registered on the same day on desktop alone, 38% more than the average of previous months. Bluesky also saw an increase in daily visits on Election Day and the day after, to 1.2 million and 1.3 million respectively, up from around 800,000 in previous days.

“Whether there will be a measurable decline in viewership for X due to politics remains to be seen,” said David Carr, editor of insights, news and research at Similarweb, in a blog post on Tuesday. But he added: “X’s recent daily peak in US traffic does not offset the decline in viewership the service has experienced in recent years since Musk took over the service.”

Sensor Tower, another market research firm, found that daily active app users and time spent on X have skyrocketed November 5th and 6th compared to the previous 30 days. But as of November 10th, there were X daily active users relatively flat compared to just before the election, while Bluesky saw a 28% increase among the users in the same period.

Still, X has far more users than Bluesky, Sensor Tower found. (Bluesky also remains much smaller than Meta’s Threads.)

A third app data analytics company, Apptopia, also told CNN that activity on X had increased significantly in the lead-up to the election. It said that X daily active users peaked days later, on November 9th, before declining slightly. On Bluesky, daily users more than doubled from mid-October to the week after the election.

The conclusion from all of these numbers is that usage of Bluesky saw a post-election uptick that appears to be continuing, even if the overall user base is still relatively small.

Of course, a lot of people flock to all kinds of media during and around election week. And it’s worth remembering that in the wake of previous Musk incidents, we’ve already seen numerous users swore off X, only that many of them have returned to the platform.

Nonetheless, some well-known social media users say they are now seeing more engagement on their posts on Bluesky – the thing users of these sites typically value above all else – despite having a larger following on X.

Ed Zitron, founder of media company EZPR, told CNN he and others stayed on X “because there is a critical mass of readers there and the content you post is viral.”

However, Zitron said, “Given Bluesky’s current scale, I don’t see how (X) can remain dominant,” adding that he has 90,000 followers on X but “actual engagement doesn’t seem to match that.”

New York Times journalist Mike Isaac made a similar remark in a Bluesky post on Tuesday: “It’s really confusing to go from Twitter – where I publish a post to 200,000 followers and get five favorites – to Bluesky, where a post immediately receives around 200 favorites.”

But here’s the thing: Even if

Although Musk said when he acquired the platform that he wanted to make it a “politically neutral” digital town square, under his leadership, Musk made In the run-up to the election, Musk spread false and misleading claims about Trump’s rival, Vice President Kamala Harris. The platform also reportedly pushed political and pro-Trump content on users whether they wanted it or not.

X has now become something of a hub for right-wing social media users.

And by using the platform as a megaphone to promote Trump, Musk may have achieved a return he couldn’t even imagine when he bought Twitter for $44 billion two years ago: direct access to the US president .

Trump announced Tuesday evening that Musk would take on an official role in his administration and be one of two people, alongside Vivek Ramaswamy, to lead a new “Department of Government Efficiency.” Musk also participated in a phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky immediately after the election, presumably to discuss the country’s war with Russia, in which Musk’s Starlink has played a key role as a communications tool.

And Musk’s personal fortune also rose 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 a lot more than X’s declining ad revenue and any lost users in Musk’s mind.

–Liam Reilly and Matt Egan of CNN contributed to this report.