SensorTower and SimilarWeb show that compared to the weekend, daily active users and time spent on Threads, Facebook's competitor to Twitter, have diminished. Despite this, the app still managed to amass 100 million signups in 5 days, and it appears to be poaching some users from Twitter, putting it among the most quickly established apps ever.
Recent data suggests that engagement with Meta's new Twitter competitor, Threads, has begun to succumb to the laws of gravity. Last week, the text-based social media platform announced a record 100 million sign-ups in just five days, but findings from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower and digital analytics company Similarweb suggest a declining trend for user engagement. After experiencing unprecedented success in its first few days,Sensor Tower's managing director Anthony Bartolacci noted that daily active user numbers and user engagement timesdropped by approximately 20% and 50% respectively since launch.
Similarweb data showed a more than 25% drop in daily active users between Threads' July 7 peak and Monday for users on Android worldwide. David Carr, senior insights manager at Similarweb, stated that the average time users in the U.S. spent on the app decreased from around 20 minutes on July 6 to 8 minutes on July 10.
However, a Meta spokesperson pointed out that the social media platform has still surpassed the company's expectations in its first few days. Additionally, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has commented that Threads has achieved most of its growth organically, without promotions. Going forward, Meta's focus will be on ensuring reliable performance, introducing new features, and improving the user experience in the coming months.
Adam Mosseri, the head of both Instagram and Threads at Meta, has been outspoken about not prioritizing news or politics on the new platform, which may therefore not suit the needs of some of the more extensively-used Twitter users. Mosseri commented on Threads that: "Politics and hard news are bound to appear on Threads - as they have partially on Instagram also - but we will not take any steps to stimulate those sectors". Jasmine Enberg, principal analyst at Insider Intelligence, declared that if only one out of four Instagram users employed Threads every month, it would be as popular as Twitter. Similarweb's Carr revealed to CNBC that some of the participation that Threads has fed on appears to have been taken directly from Twitter. He also noted that in its first couple of days of highest Threads activity, the web traffic for Twitter decreased about 5% from the same days in the previous week. These are preliminary indicators, but they do demonstrate that Threads possesses the capacity to poach substantial usage away from Twitter, particularly when the Threads app team begins to incorporate features such as hashtags and topical search.
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