After hitting 100 million users in just five days, Threads’ honeymoon period may be over, according to new data from SimilarWeb.
The analytics firm has published a blog post stating that engagement has dropped sharply after an initial flurry of excitement for the first serious alternative to Twitter.
Threads’ best day — July 7, its second day of open membership — saw 49 million active users on Android. This had dropped to 23.6 million by Friday, July 14.
But perhaps more worrying for Meta is the actual time spent in the app by its users. On July 7, it was averaging 21 minutes, but this had dropped to just over six a week later.
While Twitter CEO Elon Musk will be delighted that the platform’s most serious rival could just be a flash in the pan, he shouldn’t celebrate just yet. The blog post makes it clear that there are “some signs” that Threads can “eat directly into Twitter’s market share”.
“In the first two full days that Threads was generally available, Thursday and Friday, web traffic to twitter.com was down 5% compared with the same days of the previous week and Twitter Android app usage, by time spent, was down 4.3%,” David Carr, senior insights manager at SimilarWeb writes.
Worse, Twitter retention is also down, Carr says. “On Android, the percentage of new users who are continuing to regularly use the Twitter app after 30 days has dropped from 19% in May 2022 to 16% in May 2023,” he writes. “In contrast, the loyalty of new Instagram users has held steady at about 40%.”
What’s driving the Threads drop-off?
But what’s causing the Threads drop-off, and what can Meta do to reverse the trend?
Well, firstly it’s worth highlighting that this report is just based on Android data, as it’s “somewhat easier to track” than iOS. You wouldn’t expect Android users’ behaviour to be vastly different to those with iPhones, but you can’t discount it entirely.
The most likely explanation for the drop is simply that the novelty has worn off. In its first two days, Threads received a huge amount of press attention and was inundated with people checking it out. Not everyone decided to make it a daily habit, as you would probably expect — and it likely felt especially alien to Instagram users who had never tried Twitter, but were tempted to log in with their existing account.
But even hardcore Twitter users may be alienated by the direction that Meta wants to take with Threads. In an effort to make it a “less angry place for conversations”, head of Instagram and Threads, Adam Mosseri, has made it clear that the company won’t “do anything to encourage” politics and “hard news” on the platform. For a lot of people, toxic as it can be, that’s what made Twitter, Twitter.
And for some, Twitter’s less sanitised, rough-around-the-edges discourse is part of the appeal, and by contrast, Threads is a bit, well, boring.
One subscriber to that point of view seems to be Twitter owner Elon Musk. “Whatever sins this platform may have, being boring is not one of them,” he tweeted yesterday.
“It is infinitely preferable to be attacked by strangers on Twitter, than indulge in the false happiness of hide-the-pain Instagram,” he said in another tweet.
Then, of course, there are the missing features. Perhaps rushing a release to take advantage of Twitter’s latest own goal, Threads arrived in an ironically thread-bare state, missing various things that Twitter users take for granted, including hashtags, a desktop interface, a usable search function, and the ability to just see posts by those you follow, rather than whatever content the algorithm believes you might enjoy.
These features and more are all coming, Mosseri says, but Meta will need to act fast if it wants to address the drop in engagement and prevent Threads from becoming a 2023 retread of Google Buzz.
