March was a Good Month for X

I've been analyzing Twitter's (now X's) revenue ever since Twitter Blue came out. That feels like a lifetime ago in internet time, doesn't it?

March just ended which means it's time to take a look at X's performance in terms of app downloads and revenue. Last month downloads were trending up while revenue trended down. March is a bit different.

According to our App Intelligence, X ended March with $8.2M of net revenue - that's what Elon and co get to keep after paying Apple and Google their fees.

That's roughly 4% higher than the previous peak aaaaaaall the way back in January. February was a bit of a downer, which wasn't the case last year, but standard market conditions don't seem to apply to Elon things, so I'm not going to try to explain it.

Downloads also rose in March as X continues its recovery after the abrupt rebranding cut its downloads in two. But downloads didn't grow much.

According to our estimates, downloads rose 3% to 10M. That's still much lower than the 15M downloads it saw back in January of 2023, but it's much higher than the 7M downloads it got in September, right after the rebrand.

While X is recovering, rival Threads continues to grow. Not that fast - 7% in March - but it started with more downloads so the numbers are bigger. According to our estimates Threads made it into 23.7M devices in March.

Both are gaining the most downloads from Android users in India, a trend we see across all social media apps and a big challenge for TikTok, which is still banned in India.