Amid Thread’s success, Elon Musk says Twitter can hit 'an all-time record'

As Threads reaches 100 million users, Twitter executive chair Elon Musk and CEO Linda Yaccarino tweeted that the platform’s cumulative user-seconds per day of phone screen time can hit “an all-time record” this week.

Elon Musk says Twitter can reach a new all-time record in terms of time spent on the platform. (REUTERS)

Meta's newest social media project Threads has been making all the right headlines ever since its launch on July 6. The app has become the fastest consumer app to reach 100 million users yesterday, July 10, beating ChatGPT which reached the milestone in two months. But it appears that despite the mind-numbing success of Threads, Twitter is still doing well and is set to create some new records of its own. If you go by company executive chair and CTO Elon Musk, and CEO Linda Yaccarino's words, that is.

A few hours ago, Yaccarino tweeted, “Don't want to leave you hanging by a thread… but Twitter, you really outdid yourselves! Last week we had our largest usage day since February”. She added, likely taking a dig at Threads, and the other Twitter-like platforms, “There's only ONE Twitter. You know it. I know it”.

Musk also replied to the tweet and said, “Cumulative user-seconds per day of phone screentime, as reported by iOS & Android, is hardest to game. I think we may hit an all-time record this week”.

Elon Musk claims Twitter usage at an all-time high

To explain, what the Twitter leaders mean, “cumulative user-seconds per day of phone screentime” is essentially the data of the time a user spends on a particular app in a given day. This does not include background activity but actual screen time, meaning the user was actively engaging with the app. It is also known as time spent on an app/website and is part of engagement data for Twitter.

As per Yaccarino, the Twitter app, based on data from iOS and Android, has seen the highest time spent cumulatively by all users since February 2023. Musk also hinted that this week the microblogging app can reach an all-time record, taking the overall user time spent to the highest since the app was first launched in 2010.

Notably, Musk changed the data metric Twitter captures from mDAU (daily active users - mobile) to user-seconds after acquiring the platform as a better way to map its performance. Before the acquisition, he raised concerns that bots can manipulate the data. In a separate tweet, he explained, “it is hardest to fool. Troll farms can still manipulate screentime via humans with lots of phones, but that is >100 times more expensive than bots”.

While neither has shared any data, the timing of the announcement is rather interesting given yesterday, July 10, Threads reached a huge milestone of acquiring 100 million users.

Recently, Musk has been taking numerous digs at Threads app and Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of its parent company Meta including one instance recently where the former shockingly challenged the latter to a “literal” penis measuring contest.