Meta’s Threads, the newest competitor to Twitter, witnessed some 150 million app downloads and at one point had 114 million sign-ups in literally a matter of days after launch, but apparently and just as quick, users aren’t sticking around.
Data analytics company Similarweb, the number of daily active users on Threads dropped from 49 million to 23.6 million in just a week. That’s nearly 26 million that just vaporized in the air.
Threads’s total daily minutes of use, a metric which measures the time users stay on the app, has also declined from 21 minutes on July 7 to just over 6 minutes on July 14, according to Similarweb data.
Read: Threads exceeds 100 mn users in record time, outpacing ChatGPT and Twitter
Threads experienced early success based on how easy it was for Instagram users to create an account, however, past the initial euphoria and Twitter subscribers’ dissatisfaction with a recent decision to limit the number of posts users can read on the app and the fee-based checkmark for account verification.
But Threads is still missing many of the basic features that Twitter has furnished for many years, including emoji, hashtags, and a chronological feed. However, Threads did roll out last Tuesday its first batch of updates to the iOS version of the app, including a translation button, a tab on users’ activity feed to reveal who’s followed them and the option to subscribe and receive notifications from accounts a user doesn’t follow. Too little too late?
Threads seems to be confronting some of the typical issues that often plague social media platforms, including user retention, spam and some early regulatory scrutiny around content moderation.
Twitter update
Twitter has an implied value of $23bn and this after Musk told staff in March that the social media platform had lost over half its value. Musk paid $44 bn to take over Twitter in October 2022.
Musk said over the weekend that advertising on Twitter had fallen by nearly 50% and the business remained cashflow negative.
For more technology news, click here.
