X Recovers After Months of Revenue Decline

X's mobile revenue has been declining for several months now after peaking back in March leading to the obvious question - is X's growth done?

Luckily for X, which I no longer call Twitter, July was a good month. Revenue rebounded and also rose to a new higher.

According to our estimates, users spent $12.7M in X's mobile apps in July. Of that, Elon and co took $8.9M after Apple and Google took their fees.

The App Store was responsible for the majority of revenue - 77% - and Google Play for the rest. The US is the major earner for X, but I always found the runner-up, Japan, to be a nice surprise. We don't usually see that with apps.

July's haul marks a 20% month-over-month growth, which is impressive after the slump X has seen. It also marks a healthy 8% increase over X's previous all-time high back in March, and a 424% increase over January of 2023.

So, things are finally looking good. But...

Being on an upward trend is great, but the reality is that X's revenue isn't nearly as high as it can be, and that's a problem X has to figure out.

I say that because other social platforms that followed X's strategy are making quite a lot more. Our App Intelligence shows that in July, Snapchat raked in $32M and Instagram $23M of net revenue (after store fees), which is 3-4x higher than X. Both started monetizing much later.

I've also added Telegram to this comparison because it's trying to be a social network and while it didn't beat X just yet, it's very close with $7.4M estimated net revenue.

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