Threads appears to be unspooling.
Since storming out of the gates with 100 million users in less than a week, Meta Platform Inc.’s
META,
much-ballyhooed Twitter-killer has cooled in growth and engagement, according to data from market researchers Sensor Tower and Similarweb.
On Thursday, the number of daily active users on Threads plunged 27% from Saturday. Meanwhile, time spent on the app for users plummeted 70%, to 5 minutes a day, Sensor Tower said.
“We have seen a day-over-day, 20% decline since the first day of launch (July 5),” Abe Yousef, senior insights analyst at Sensor Tower, said in an interview. “This suggests how difficult it is to launch a social network with staying power. Despite the initial hoopla, it will take a longer time for Threads to carve out space in most users’ social network routine.”
What has stunted Threads’ growth is a general lack of compelling content available on Twitter, and a reluctance among many Twitter users to make the jump, Yousef said. Indeed, he noted a torrent of anti-Threads remarks on Twitter.
He suggested Meta may have rushed Threads to market to take advantage of user discontent with Twitter, which has become a breeding ground for misinformation and hate speech since Tesla Inc.
TSLA,
Chief Executive Elon Musk bought the micro-blogging site for $44 billion last year.
“The ease with which to join Threads and import users from Instagram was a boost that fed into the hype among consumers,” Yousef said. “People have been notably upset with Twitter. But they soon discovered it was hard to bring followers onto Threads from Twitter, Facebook and other social-media platforms.”
Indeed, data from Similarweb indicates daily active users on Threads dropped more than 25% between its July 7 peak and Monday on Android phones worldwide. Data on iOS devices were still being tabulated.
At the same time, the use of Threads was cut in half, from 20 minutes on July 6 to about 8 minutes on July 10, according to Similarweb.