It's safe to say that, a month after its launch, Meta's Threads hasn't exactly lived up to its "Twitter Killer" potential. Though Mark Zuckerberg's latest social media platform got off to a record-setting start, landing more than 100 million sign-ups less than a week after launching, daily users have been steadily falling ever since.
As of July 31, according to Similarweb and Sensor Tower, Threads' daily active user count has fallen 82% from its launch. Now, only around eight million people are active on the app each day.
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This, Sensor Tower noted, is the lowest number of daily active users Threads has had since the number peaked at 44 million the day after it launched.
But it's not just that fewer people are going onto Threads; the ones that do are spending less time on the platform and are not opening the app as often as they did before, according to Sensor Tower.
As of August 1, Threads' daily average time had fallen to just under three minutes a day, Sensor Tower said. That number, on the day it launched, was around 20 minutes.
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“We saw unprecedented growth out of the gate and more importantly we’re seeing more people coming back daily than I’d expected,” Zuckerberg said in July. “And now, we’re focused on retention and improving the basics. And then after that, we’ll focus on growing the community to the scale we think is possible.”
And as Zuckerberg and co. work to figure out ways to fix the platform, his rival, Elon Musk, seems to know the culprit behind the flagging numbers.
"It committed the cardinal sin," he tweeted. "Boring people to death."
It committed the cardinal sin: boring people to death
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 3, 2023
Musk, who has regularly accused Zuckerberg and Meta of maliciously copy-and-pasting Twitter in order to create Threads, sent the company a cease-and-desist letter not long after its launch. He has also criticized Meta's data practices and the "false happiness" of its platforms.
"It is infinitely preferable to be attacked by strangers on Twitter than indulge in the false happiness of hide-the-pain Instagram," he said.
