Bluesky, a social networking startup, has experienced a surge of new users from the U.K. following Elon Musk’s controversial statements about the U.K. riots. The company has reported a 60% increase in activity from U.K.-based accounts, making it the country with the highest number of signups for Bluesky in the past seven days.
However, despite the growing number of U.K. users on Bluesky, data from Similarweb suggests that Meta’s Threads, not Bluesky, is better positioned to challenge Musk’s social network, X (formerly known as Twitter). The impact of U.K.-based users joining Bluesky is still relatively small. While Bluesky saw 67,800 U.K.-based daily active users on August 11, it had previously experienced higher usage from U.K. users in January of this year.
In contrast, Threads saw an 8.6% increase in monthly active users in the U.K. from June to July. This indicates that the impact of the U.K.-driven shift on X is underwhelming. X still had 6 million daily active users from the U.K., significantly more than Threads or Bluesky.
Furthermore, Similarweb’s analysis of Android data worldwide shows that X remains far ahead of Threads and Bluesky in terms of daily active users. As of August 12, X had 91.0 million global daily active users, while Threads and Bluesky had 34.9 million and 594,700 global daily active users, respectively. On the web, X.com received 192.5 million daily web visits, compared to just 3.7 million for Threads and 616,200 for Bluesky.
Although X’s lead is wider in the U.S. than in the U.K., it is still possible for a competitor like Bluesky or Threads to gain traction in the U.K. market if the switching trend continues to grow over time. X is 5.9 times larger than Threads in the U.S. and just over three times larger in the U.K. in terms of monthly active users. This narrower lead in the U.K. presents an opportunity for Bluesky or Threads to attract more users and potentially challenge X in the future.
