Threads Adds 35 Million More Members in November - But Bluesky's Traffic is Surging

At the start of November Threads had 275 million members. But in 30 days it's apparently increased another 12%, reports The Verge:

Threads has accrued over 35 million signups so far in November and is 'going on three months with more than a million signups a day,' Meta spokesperson Alec Booker told The Verge in an email today. 20 million of those signups have come since November 14th, as Axios notes...

At the same time, Bluesky has seen a surge of interest. The platform grew to 15 million users earlier this month and continued to add about a million signups per day for several days. It now sits at over 22 million users.

Dave Earley, audience editor at Guardian Australia, says that traffic to TheGuardian.com from BlueSky 'is already 2x that of Threads.'
[T]hat's on a straight threads.net vs bsky.app referral comparison. BUT! 75-80% of tracked referral from owned Bluesky account posts is NOT being attributed to bsky.app, so I'm certain organic traffic would be undercounting by that much as well. By which I mean, I'm pretty sure traffic from bsky.app to theguardian.com is *significantly* higher than the very obvious 2x that of Threads.
That post was in response to one by a platform VP for the Boston Globe newspaper, who'd reported that traffic from Bluesky to bostonglobe.com 'is already 3x that of Threads, and we are seeing 4.5x the conversions to paying digital subscribers.'

And Axios notes that Bluesky's growth 'has spurred inbound interest for a new investment round, just weeks after raising $15 million in Series A funding, per Axios' Dan Primack.'

In response, Threads 'rolled out a series of changes over the past week in what was seen as an attempt to keep an edge over Bluesky,' reports The Hill:

The changes included a new custom feed feature, which gives users the ability to build their feeds around the topics and people they are most interested in. Bluesky lets users make their own lists and feeds and set their own content moderation preferences. The platform also rolled out a few 'long-overdue improvements' to its search and trending now features and its algorithm.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.