What goes up has to come down, at least in the case of user participation in Threads, GoalTwitter’s new competitor.
Last week, the text-based social media platform reported a record 100 million records in just five days, but based on data from Sensor Tower and Similarweb, the service has seen a dip in growth and engagement.
“The release of Threads really ‘broke the internet,’ or at least the Sensor Tower models,” Anthony Bartolacci, managing director of Sensor Tower, a marketing intelligence firm, told CNBC. “In the 10+ years that Sensor Tower has been estimating app installs, the first 72 hours of Threads was truly in a class of its own.”
However, he added, the Sensor Tower data suggests a significant reversal in user engagement since the launch of Threads: On Tuesday and Wednesday, the number of daily active users of the platform dropped by 20% from Saturday. , and the time spent by the user was reduced by 50%. , from 20 minutes to 10 minutes.
“These early returns indicate that despite the hype at launch, Threads will still have some uphill climb to gain a foothold in the social networking routine of most users,” Bartolacci said. “The backing of Meta and the integration with Instagram are likely to give Threads a much larger flood than other services, but it will need a more compelling value proposition than just ‘Twitter without Elon Musk.'”
Data from Similarweb, a digital data and analytics company, showed similar trends. Threads experienced a more than 25% drop in daily active users between its July 7 peak and Monday for Threads users on Android phones worldwide. The company hasn’t finished calibrating its model with iOS data yet.
Data from Similarweb also suggested that usage time dropped by more than half, with the average amount of time US users spent on the app dropping from about 20 minutes on July 6 to just over 8 minutes on July 10th.
“We saw a drop in engagement over the weekend, and as of Monday we estimated that Threads had 36.6 million active users on Android,” David Carr, a senior information manager at Similarweb, told CNBC, adding: “While there was a lot of interest in checking out the initially, not all users are in the habit of visiting Threads as often as they would with other social apps.”
Since its debut on July 5, Threads made headlines for its Instagram check-in integration, algorithmic feed, and positive sentiment. of advertisers. One day after the release of Threads, the edge reported that users had already published more than 95 million posts and 190 million likes, according to internal company data he had seen.
Threads is still in its early days, and it’s only natural for a registration boom to subside as users explore a new service and if the community and themes it drives fit together.
A Meta spokesperson noted, “Although it is early days, we are excited by the initial success of Threads, which exceeded our expectations. We launched the app a little over a week ago, and our focus now is to ensure stable performance, deliver new features, and continue to improve the experience in the coming months.” The company also noted that CEO Mark Zuckerberg commented on Threads that most of its growth to 100 million subscriptions was organic, not the result of promotions.
Adam Mosseri, Head of Instagram and Threads at Meta, has been vocal about the fact that it doesn’t plan to prioritize news or politics on the new platform, which means it may not serve as an apples-to-apples Twitter replacement for some power users.
“Politics and hard news will inevitably show up on Threads, they have on Instagram to some degree as well, but we’re not going to do anything to encourage those verticals.” Mosseri wrote in Threads.
“Meta only needs 1 in 4 Instagram users to use Threads on a monthly basis for it to be as big as Twitter,” said Jasmine Enberg, principal analyst at Insider Intelligence. in a sentence.
“Some of the engagements Threads has enjoyed appear to have been siphoned straight from Twitter,” Similarweb’s Carr told CNBC. “In the first days of peak activity for Threads, last Thursday and Friday, Twitter web traffic decreased by approximately 5% compared to the same days of the previous week. Admittedly, these are very early indicators, but they do show that Threads has the potential to steal significant use from Twitter, particularly as the Threads app team begins to fill in missing features like hashtags and topic search.”
