Daily active users on Instagram’s Twitter rivaling Threads microblogging platform have declined in the first week after it launched. There are several reasons why the initial surge in users has now become a trickle.
Just a week ago, Meta’s Threads app surpassed 100 million users, becoming one of the fastest to reach that milestone. However, not all is as rosy as it seems with the latest social media product.
Meta Threads Unravelling?
On July 17, Olivia Moor, consumer partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), posted an update on the Threads ecosystem.
One week after launch, daily active users on Threads are down 40%, and the average daily time per user dropped four times, she reported.
“It turns out that plugging 100M users into a copycat product isn’t a slam dunk,” she said.
Late last week, Axios confirmed the declines in daily active users and time spent on the platform. The average time spent by users on Threads has dropped 50% from 20 minutes to just 10 minutes.
Moore acknowledged that the speed at which Threads achieved 100 million users was remarkable. However, most of them were just ported over from Instagram, so they were not new ecosystem users.
SensorTower estimated that 16% of users returned to the platform a week after download, which is about half of Twitter’s 7-day retention.
Moore said that users are not returning because their posts are tied to their real identities on Instagram. Furthermore, Instagram users are not as comfortable creating text content as Twitter users.
“Twitter has built a unique social graph and interest graph that’s hard to replace,” she said before concluding:
“Even with a copycat product, the underlying networks and user identities developed over a decade are tough to replicate.”
According to Data.ai, India is the country with the most Threads app downloads, at about a third of the total. However, daily downloads have fallen significantly since the initial spike when it launched.
Little Love For Threads
Other social media users complained about Threads having the same censorship policies as Facebook and Instagram.
Last week, the Babylon Bee reported that the “New ‘Threads’ app successfully combines everything you hate about Twitter with everything you hate about Instagram.” Meanwhile, tech outlet Gizmodo reported that engagement on Threads had “cratered.”
Some even compared charts showing interest and engagement to a “sh**coin chart.”
Other epic fails from the firm formerly known as Facebook include the defunct Diem cryptocurrency and its Metaverse, after which the company was renamed.
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