The urgency of masks told by numbers: The $1 million prize strategy as X is chased by Threads

In January 2026, the X (formerly Twitter) platform began to show signs of frantic activity. Mask’s tweets reveal a sense of urgency. He publicly stated, “We are still not paying creators enough, and our revenue sharing mechanism is not optimized. YouTube is surpassing us in this regard.” The background of this anxiety lies in fierce competition between platforms and the stark reality that speaks louder than emoticons.

Last weekend, the official X announced a “$1 million article reward campaign,” sparking a “long-form content boom” on the platform. Currently, the most attention-grabbing article is DAN KOE’s “How to Fix Your Life in 1 Day,” which has already recorded over 150 million views. Mask himself retweeted this article. However, behind this grand campaign lies an undeniable sense of urgency that Mask cannot fully hide.

Reasons Mask Has No Choice but to Act: User Exodus and Revenue Crisis

The rise of Threads is not just a new competitor for Mask but an existential threat. Data from analytics firm Similarweb, released in early January 2026, tells a serious story.

Global daily active users (DAU) on Threads have reached an average of 143 million, surpassing X’s 126 million. In terms of growth rate, X faces an 11.9% decline year-over-year, while Threads has achieved an astonishing 37.8% growth.

The same trend continues with monthly active users (MAU). Threads grew from 350 million in 2025 to 400 million, and as of January 2026, it maintains 320 million MAU. Meanwhile, X’s MAU remains around 610 million, but since Mask’s acquisition, it has lost a total of 32 million users. This dichotomy signals a crisis that Mask cannot ignore.

User exodus directly impacts revenue. X’s global advertising revenue plummeted to $2.5 billion in 2024, nearly halving from $4.4 billion in 2022. Although a slight recovery to $22.6 billion is forecasted for 2025, the overall downward trend is clear. Even more concerning is the forecast by analysts that Threads will generate $11.3 billion in advertising revenue in 2026—several times X’s projected income.

X finally achieved quarterly revenue growth at the end of 2025, but due to high restructuring costs, the company remains in the red. Mask’s initial goal of making X Premium (paid subscriptions) account for 50% of total revenue remains far out of reach, despite significant growth in 2025.

Buying the Future of Long-Form Content with $1 Million: Strategy Reimagined

Faced with these harsh realities, Mask has chosen a bold move: a “long-form article reward campaign.” This is not a whim but a deep strategic decision related to the platform’s future positioning.

At the core of X’s recommendation algorithm is an indicator called “user regret-free time.” This measures the total time users spend engaging with content, and Mask explicitly points out that this mechanism naturally favors long-form content. Longer articles can “accumulate more user seconds,” which directly impacts algorithmic weighting and overall engagement.

Recent algorithm updates have introduced a “content format weighting” feature, clearly favoring long-form content that requires more effort to produce and has greater influence. High-quality long articles effectively prevent users from leaving via external links and extend their stay within the platform. Simultaneously, these contents supply high-quality training data for Mask’s AI project Grok AI.

Mask repeatedly emphasizes his vision of transforming X into “the world’s best news source” and aggregating “collective intelligence” in real-time, aiming to replace traditional media. The long-form article feature allows users to publish “complete articles and works,” enabling experts, eyewitnesses, and deep thinkers to share full insights directly, rather than fragments.

In contrast to platforms like TikTok that pour massive subsidies into short videos, the incentive model for long-form articles is more easily monetized through subscription-based revenue cycles. This can attract more projectors, journalists, and prominent writers back to X.

However, a question remains: in an era where reading habits worldwide are fragmented, why is Mask pushing this “long-form renaissance”?

The answer is paradoxical. While younger generations like Gen Z tend to prefer multiple short sessions of 5-10 minutes per day, data also suggests that overall reading volume is actually increasing. Amid digital fatigue, users are seeking depth, emotional connection, and meaningful content consumption. This can be called the rise of “slow immersive reading.”

What X aims for is not just an entertainment platform like TikTok but a “life hub” similar to WeChat—what Mask often refers to as the “Everything App.”

The Dream of WeChatification and Its Long Road: Toward the Everything App

All of Mask’s urgency and initiatives ultimately converge into a grand ambition: to evolve X into an “Everything App” like WeChat. But there is a significant gap between this ambition and reality.

Compared by monthly active users (MAU), WeChat has over 1.4 billion users, while X has 570 million—less than a quarter of WeChat’s user base. This vast difference in user base makes building the “network effect”—where all friends, family, and services are concentrated on the platform, making users reluctant to leave—extremely difficult. WeChat is an essential part of many people’s daily lives, whereas X remains primarily a social media for news and opinions, retaining the remnants of Twitter.

User retention rates also differ markedly. The average daily usage time for WeChat users is 82 minutes, while X users only spend 30-35 minutes. The reason is that WeChat users can complete numerous “productive” tasks—chat, payments, shopping, municipal services—whereas X’s content consumption remains passive and primarily browsing-based, fostering a “leave immediately after viewing” behavior pattern.

Mask does not want X to become TikTok. Therefore, he believes X must break free from the entertainment experience of “leaving immediately after viewing.” By providing high-quality, in-depth content, user retention can be improved, attracting high-value users, and gradually integrating services like payments and e-commerce based on content—laying the foundation for the “Everything App,” which is Mask’s strategic vision.

The more ambitious this dream, the longer the road to realization, and the greater Mask’s sense of urgency. The $1 million reward campaign can be seen as the most visible expression of that urgency.