Nothing good lasts forever--even for Mark Zuckerberg.
The Meta Platforms (META) -) CEO saw Threads, his so-called "Twitter Killer'" social media site, soar to dizzying heights in its recent debut.
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The a new Instagram feature reported a record 100 million sign-ups in five days and reviving up talk of the demise Twitter, which belong's to Zuckerberg's arch rival Elon Musk.
Ark Invest -- which has long supported Tesla CEO Elon Musk -- said in a July 10 note that Threads "could become a powerful competitor to Twitter."
"Leveraging Instagram’s infrastructure and social graphs with a slick interface and hints of decentralization, at the same time that Twitter was facing criticism for limiting activity to surface and eliminate bots, could prove brilliant as a go-to-market strategy,” Ark's associate portfolio manager Nick Grous wrote.
The analyst noted that while Meta deserved accolades for the most successful online platform launch in history, "time will tell whether Threads will be a replay of Stories’ success against Snapchat or Reels’ relegation to a stepchild of Tiktok."
A 'Significant Pullback'
Time keeps slipping into the future, as the Steve Miller Band told us back in 1976, and Threads has experienced some drop-off in growth and engagement, according to data from Sensor Tower and Similarweb.
“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, told 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.”
However, Bartolacci said Sensor Tower data suggests a significant pullback in user engagement since Threads’ launch.
On July 11 and July 12, the platform’s number of daily active users were down about 20% from July 8, and the time spent for user was down 50%, from 20 minutes to 10 minutes. Threads launched on July 5.
Bartolacci said 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.”
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He added that the platform will need "a more compelling value proposition than simply ‘Twitter, but without Elon Musk.’”
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.
It’s important to note that Threads is still in its extremely early days, and it’s natural for a sign-up boom to taper off as users explore a new service.
Twitter Fans Get Snarky
Meanwhile over at Twitter, Musk, who is also Tesla's (TSLA) -) CEO, recently said that the first payouts for the microblogging site's ad revenue sharing program will be cumulative since its introduction in February.
You must be a verified user -- paying 8 bucks per month for Twitter Blue -- in order to be eligible for the payout.
Any user can potentially become eligible to get ad revenue sharing. All you need to do is be subscribed to Twitter Blue and have at least five million impressions on your post in each of the last three months.
"Looks like this platform may see all time high device user seconds usage this week," Musk tweeted on July 14.
Twitter supporters gleefully shifted into snark mode as they mocked Threads's numbers nosedive.
One person posted an image of Musk done up as the Grim Reaper with the Twitter mascot on his chest knocking on door with the Threads logo.
Behind him are doors bearing the names of the social media platforms Mastodon, Blue Sky and Truth Social and they're all leaking blood.
“The ‘Twitter Killer’ looks like a rug pull,” another comment read.
"Meta : Over 2b users - only 100m-125m have signed up since its launch," another person said. "They literally just have to tap a few buttons to merge their Meta account in with threads. so barely even a 10% conversion from their own users is a very poor launch."
