Tesla CEO Elon Musk recently commented on a post on X, which highlighted that the platform was leading in traffic generation via Google’s top 100 organic search results.
“X Traffic Update! X surpasses Instagram and Facebook by a significant margin in driving traffic through Google”, read the post. “Guess we’re not dead yet,” Musk commented sharing the post, accompanied by the tears-of-joy emoji.
Musk’s post garnered a significant 39 million views and 336,000 likes within 24 hours. It also sparked a discussion in the replies.
A user replied, “Meta is censorship. X is free speech. This is not difficult,” accumulating more than 4,200 likes.
Musk acquired Twitter for $44 billion in 2022. Since then, he has implemented some major changes to the social media platform, including rebranding it as X, retiring the iconic bird logo and reducing its workforce by approximately 80%.
However, while X may be performing better than some had anticipated, Meta remains a behemoth in the social media industry.
Meta's third-quarter earnings report for the period ending September 30, 2023, shows Facebook had reached 3.05 billion monthly active users, a 3% increase from the previous year.
The broader reach of Meta's family of services including Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp, among others, amassed a whopping 3.96 billion monthly active users as of the end of Q3, marking 7% growth year over year. This figure represents approximately half of the global population.
Meta has also seen improvements in user monetization. In Q3, Facebook's average revenue per user (ARPU) rose to $11.23, up from $9.41 in the same quarter the previous year.
The company's total revenue in Q3 grew by 23% year over year, reaching $34.15 billion. Net income came in at $11.58 billion, or $4.39 per share.