Instagram’s Threads Engagement Has Already Dropped off
The engagement on Meta’s Twitter rival app Threads has already dropped off — after it hit 100 million users barely a week after its launch.
On Monday, Threads was revealed to be the fastest-growing app ever. Following the app’s release on July 5, Meta’s Twitter killer reached the milestone of 100 million users in just five days.
Threads’ meteoric rise portended that the app may truly have the potential to unseat Twitter in the text-based social media space.
However, CNBC News reports that, according to data from Sensor Tower and Similarweb, Threads has already seen a drop in daily active users and time spent on the app since its record-breaking debut.
‘An Uphill Climb for Threads’
“The Threads launch really did ‘break the internet,’ or at least the Sensor Tower models,” Anthony Bartolacci, managing director at Sensor Tower, a marketing intelligence firm, tells CNBC.
“In the 10-plus years Sensor Tower has been estimating app installs, the first 72 hours of Threads was truly in a class by itself.”
But data from Sensor Tower suggests a significant drop-off in growth and engagement since Threads’ launch. On Tuesday and Wednesday, the platform’s number of daily active users were down about 20% from Saturday.
Meanwhile, the time spent on the app by users has plunged by 50%, from 20 minutes to 10 minutes.
“These early returns signal that despite the hoopla during its launch, it will still be an uphill climb for Threads to carve out space in most users’ social network routine,” Bartolacci says.
“The backing of Meta and the integration with Instagram likely gives Threads a much higher flood than other services, but it will need a more compelling value proposition than simply ‘Twitter, but without Elon Musk.’”
Decline in Interest
Meanwhile, according to CNBC, data from Similarweb painted a similar picture. Threads saw a plunge of more than 25% in daily active users between its July 7 peak and Monday for Threads users on Android phones worldwide. The company is not yet finished calibrating its model with iOS data.
Similarweb data also suggested that usage time dropped by more than half, with the average amount of time U.S. users spent on the app dropping from about 20 minutes on July 6 to just over 8 minutes on July 10.
“We did see engagement drop somewhat over the weekend, and on Monday we estimate Threads had 36.6 million active users on Android,” David Carr, senior insights manager at Similarweb, tells CNBC.
“While there was intense interest in checking out the app initially, not every user has made a habit of visiting Threads as often as they might other social apps.”
Threads Still Has The Potential To Kill Twitter
However, Carr pointed out that Twitter’s web traffic had taken a dive since the launch of Threads and this could be significant in the coming months.
Currently, the Threads app is missing basic features that many users looking for a Twitter alternative would normally view as essential — such as hashtag support and the ability to search beyond usernames.
But when Meta’s app is fully featured, it could spell bad news for Twitter.
“Some of the engagement Threads has enjoyed seems to have been siphoned straight from Twitter,” Similarweb’s Carr tells CNBC.
“In the first couple of days of peak Threads activity, last Thursday and Friday, Twitter web traffic was down about 5% from the same days of the previous week.
“These are admittedly very early indicators, but they do show Threads has the potential to steal significant usage away from Twitter, particularly as the Threads app team starts to fill in missing features like hashtags and topical search.”
Image credits: Header photo licensed via Depositphotos.
