The media was astonished by the meteoric rise of Threads’ users. They declared Twitter dead and bowed down to Mark Zuckerberg who had beaten Elon Musk’s outmoded views on free speech.
We were fed stories for days about the number and types of social media apps, the number of downloads, the user signups, and the comparisons with other apps. What Threads achieved in a few days, other apps took months to achieve. Few people, if anyone, recognized that Threads stood on Instagram’s shoulders and was heading down a similar road as the now-defunct Google+ platform. At the time, I said that I was not impressed with Threads’ first numbers. I said that it was inevitable Threads would have a large number of signups when the app launched. The real question is how many users will continue to use the app in the weeks and months ahead.
Now we know. According to a recent report, Threads is struggling to retain users. According to market research firms Similarweb, Sensor Tower, and Sensor Tower’s data, Thread’s daily active users are down 82% as of July 31, according to the report. The number of daily active users peaked the day following its launch at 44 million and is now down to just eight million. Twitter has a monetizable user count of nearly 200 million.
All the media reports which rushed to declare Twitter dead were clearly projections.
Sensor Tower found that users are also spending less time using the app, and they open it less often.
The company said that on the day of its launch, Threads users used the app 14 times on average and spent 19 minutes scrolling. These figures dropped sharply by the end of the first month.
Abe Yousef is a senior insight analyst at Sensor Tower. He said that as of August 1, the average daily time spent on Threads was just 2.9 seconds and users only spent 2.6 sessions a day using it.
Similarweb’s findings showed a similar pattern of decline. Threads’ users peaked on July 7, just a day after its launch, at around 49 million. They then steadily declined to just under 11 million by the 29th of July, according to David Carr, senior insights manager at Similarweb.
The two weeks following the launch of Threads saw the steepest decline. The new data shows that the decline is continuing.
According to reports, Threads’ daily user count is falling by 1% per day. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg claims he’s “quite optimistic” nevertheless.
He said, “We’ve seen unprecedented growth from the start and we’re more than happy to see that more people are returning daily than I expected.” “Now, we are focused on retention and improving our basics. Then, we will focus on expanding the community as much as we can.
Do not count on it. Threads, for all its hype, seems to be on the same path as Google+. The platform had a massive surge in users when it launched, but did not deliver what users wanted. Threads might not be dead, but it isn’t going to kill Twitter.
