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Witnessing Meta’s shiny new text-based application, Threads has been like a rollercoaster since its launch on July 5 which was preponed to our surprise and leaving Elon Musk’s strategy for introducing Twitter rate limits in confusion. The new app amassed over 150 million downloads to date, becoming the fastest-growing app since Facebook itself and beating ChatGPT.
Meta platforms CEO, Mark Zuckerberg claimed that users needed a Twitter-alternative app while launching Threads. And the data suggested that his claims were justified with more than 30 million downloads in the first few hours and over 70 million downloads following the day of launching the app.
Mark Zuckerberg’s Threads may have had a strong start when it was launched, outrunning other apps and becoming the fastest-growing app. But tables have turned now, the active users have dropped massively according to new data by Similarweb.
According to the report:
“In the race to replace Twitter, Threads is off to a strong start but still has a long way to go toward winning the enduring loyalty of those who partake in a social network dominated by text posts and linked articles. Despite attracting far broader attention than Twitter alternatives like the open source Mastodon or the still beta Bluesky, the Threads spin-off from Meta’s Instagram business unit does not yet have customers coming back regularly.”
Threads engagement and usage data
Seems that as soon as the app went viral, we saw a few setbacks like chinks in the armor. SimilarWeb has interestingly reported a drop from 49 million to 23.6 million users in the last ten days, with daily engagement plunging as well.
As per Similarweb’s estimates on July 7, Meta’s recently launched social media app attracted more than 49 million daily active users on Android globally. In comparison, Twitter had 109 million Android users on the same day.
Nevertheless, within a week, the app experienced a notable drop in its user base, with only 23.6 million active users on July 14, making up approximately 22 percent of Twitter’s audience.
The app’s highest engagement was observed in the United States, reaching around 21 minutes on July 7. However, by July 14, this level of engagement had sharply declined to just a little over 6 minutes.
Threads website data
On June 6, the threads.net website, primarily used to redirect new users to the Google and Apple mobile app stores, received 15.7 million visitors. Meta had promoted this site in a corporate announcement, but many new users chose to bypass it and instead signed up through the app stores using their existing Instagram login.
During the initial two full days of Threads being available to the public (Thursday and Friday), web traffic to twitter.com declined by 5% compared to the same days of the previous week. In a year-over-year comparison, the decline was even more significant at 11% compared to July 6 and 7, 2022. It’s worth noting that Twitter’s traffic has been experiencing an overall decline, independent of Threads, with a 4% year-over-year decrease in June.
Furthermore, there are concerning signs of reduced app user loyalty on Twitter. On Android, the percentage of new users who continue to use the Twitter app regularly after 30 days dropped from 19% in May 2022 to 16% in May 2023. In contrast, new Instagram users have shown more loyalty, with approximately 40% of them continuing to use the app regularly over the same period.
Key Takeaways
Nevertheless, we can conclude that there was a 4.3 percent decline in the time users spent on the platform, potentially suggesting that some users may have been exploring Threads as an alternative.
The app’s primary purpose is to address the setbacks of Twitter, and give a strong alternativeplatform. By providing Instagram users with a seamless way to create an account and import their existing contacts Threads has contributed to Meta’s impressive claim of surpassing 100 million account signups in just a matter of days.
But we need understand that despite Threads’ surge in popularity, Twitter’s global daily active users on Android remained relatively stable during the peak interest days.
Does this looks familiar to you, these downwards trends? It is a familiar tale tto what we have seen and heard at the time of the launch of Google+Familiar tale. It would be interesting to see if Threads could carry on growing and genuinely outgrow Twitter, or it would become that one app that sits on users phones and they seem to forget about it as it lacks to create any major impact.
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