Social app Bluesky has added more than 700,000 new users in the last week and now has around 14.5 million users. Media outlets are speculating that the surge is a response to the fact that X owner Elon Musk played such a high-profile role in the re-election of Donald Trump as US president. Bluesky is widely seen as a competitor to X.
A lot of Bluesky’s recent growth has been linked to developments over at X, which has been the centre of several controversies since its takeover by Musk. For example, when X announced that it would allow blocked users to see posts from people that blocked them, Bluesky is reckoned to have added 500,000 new users in one day.
With X’s repositioning under Musk, Bluesky has emerged as the number two free social networking app in the US App Store. The leader is Meta’s Threads, which has also cashed in on social media users’ mixed feelings about X. According to Meta CE Mark Zuckerberg, Threads now has 275m monthly users, up from 100m a year ago.
Both platforms still have some way to go before they catch X. Latest figures put the platform’s monthly users at around 600m, with large user bases in the US, UK, Indonesia, Brazil, Mexico and Turkey. That said, a recent report from Edison suggests that X usage has dropped by around 30% in the last year.
Musk’s period in charge of X has also seen some advertisers pull out of the platform, with ad revenues expected to drop from $4.4bn in 2022 to $2bn this year. Musk has tried to offset this by developing a subscription-based service called X Blue.
Recently Bluesky announced that it had raised $15 million in its Series A round. At the time, the company also said it would begin developing a subscription tier for features like higher quality video uploads or profile customisations like colours and avatar frames.
