As Instagram Threads is leaning away from news, according to statements made by Instagram head Adam Mosseri, its competitor X appears to be doubling down. Executives at the company formerly known as Twitter spoke during yesterday’s all-hands internal meeting of their desire to create a new wire service called XWire, according to Bloomberg. The product would rival existing services for press releases, like Cision’s PR Newswire.
The all-hands on Thursday was the first that both X owner Elon Musk and CEO Linda Yaccarino attended together, after her hiring in May. On the call, the execs touched on a number of initiatives planned for the company, including Musk’s well-known desire to shift X to become an “everything app,” which focuses on creators, video, payments and even hosting users’ money and securities on its platform.
The company also set its sights on competitors like YouTube and LinkedIn in terms of both video and hiring. On the latter front, X recently introduced a jobs listing service, advertised through the @XHiring account, which allows companies to post available positions directly on X through special “job cards” that detail the role, description and other job specifics. This already challenges LinkedIn’s hiring business, but adoption of the feature on X remains small-scale for the time being. The execs didn’t share additional information on how X would better compete with LinkedIn’s business, but tying into other areas where companies distribute their news, as with press releases, could possibly help.
The company shared other milestones during the meeting, including its reach of half a billion posts per day and 100 billion impressions per day — metrics that were previously confirmed to TechCrunch after being announced by Yaccarino in an interview at a Khanference 2023 event in October. And in a subsequent blog post, Yaccarino wrote that overall, users spend 7.8 billion active minutes every day and that an average user spends 32 minutes on the platform — numbers that differ slightly from recent third-party estimates focused on U.S. daily active users, who were spending 20.6 minutes on average on the platform as of September.
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