What goes up has to come down, at least in the case of user participation in Threads, GoalTwitter’s new competitor.
Last week, the text-based social media platform reported a record 100 million subscriptions in just five days, but according to data from Sensor Tower and Similarweb, the service has seen a dip in growth and engagement.
“The release of Threads really ‘broke the internet,’ or at least the Sensor Tower models,” Anthony Bartolacci, managing director of Sensor Tower, a marketing intelligence firm, told CNBC. “In the 10+ years that Sensor Tower has been estimating app installs, the first 72 hours of Threads was truly in a class of its own.”
However, he added, the Sensor Tower data suggests a significant reversal in user engagement since the launch of Threads: On Tuesday and Wednesday, the number of daily active users of the platform dropped by 20% from Saturday. , and the time spent by the user was reduced by 50%. , from 20 minutes to 10 minutes.
“These early returns indicate that despite the hype at launch, Threads will still have some uphill climb to find its way into the social networking routine of most users,” Bartolacci said. “The support of Meta and the integration with Instagram probably gives Threads a much bigger flood than other services, but it will need a more compelling value proposition than just ‘Twitter, but without Elon Musk’.”
Data from Similarweb, a digital data and analytics company, showed similar trends. Threads experienced a more than 25% drop in daily active users between its July 7 peak and Monday for Threads users on Android phones worldwide. The company hasn’t finished calibrating its model with iOS data yet.
Data from Similarweb also suggested that usage time dropped by more than half, with the average amount of time US users spent on the app dropping from about 20 minutes on July 6 to just over 8 minutes on July 10th.
“We saw a drop in engagement over the weekend, and as of Monday we estimated that Threads had 36.6 million active users on Android,” David Carr, a senior insights manager at Similarweb, told CNBC, adding: “While There was a lot of interest in checking out the initially, not all users are in the habit of visiting Threads as often as they would with other social apps.”
Since its debut on July 5th, Threads made headlines for its Instagram registration integration, algorithmic feed, and positive sentiment from advertisers. One day after the release of Threads, the edge reported that users had already published more than 95 million posts and 190 million likes, according to internal company data he had seen.
Threads is still in its early days, and it’s only natural for a registration boom to subside as users explore a new service and if the community and themes it drives fit together.
Adam Mosseri, Head of Instagram and Threads at Meta, has been vocal about the fact that it doesn’t plan to prioritize news or politics on the new platform, which means it may not serve as an apples-to-apples Twitter replacement for some power users.
“Politics and hard news will inevitably show up on Threads, they have on Instagram to some degree as well, but we’re not going to do anything to encourage those verticals,” Mosseri wrote on Threads.
“Meta only needs 1 in 4 Instagram users to use Threads on a monthly basis for it to be as big as Twitter,” Jasmine Enberg, principal analyst at Insider Intelligence, said in a statement.
“Some of the engagements Threads has enjoyed appear to have been siphoned straight from Twitter,” Similarweb’s Carr told CNBC. “In the first peak days of Threads, last Thursday and Friday, Twitter web traffic was down about 5% from the same days last week. Admittedly, these are very early indicators, but they do show that Threads has the potential to steal meaningful use from Twitter, particularly as the Threads app team begins to fill in missing features like hashtags and topic search.”
Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
