Threads’ Traffic Has Dropped Off As The Launch Frenzy Dies Down

The frenzy is dying, and the numbers are dropping for Threads, Meta’s new social media platform designed as a real-time online conversation competitor with Twitter.

Threads has seen record-breaking signups since it was launched more than a week ago. The text-based platform became the first to reach 100 million users within days after launch, rattling Twitter owner Elon Musk, who threatened to sue Meta for stealing his company’s “trade secrets and other intellectual property.”

“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.”

The pace of Threads’ growth sparked the belief that the Instagram-based platform will surpass Twitter’s 400 million user base within a short time. However, the frenzy that riled up the numbers is waning, resulting in some dropoff in growth and engagement on the platform.

Bartolacci added that Sensor Tower data suggests a significant pullback in user engagement on Threads on Tuesday and Wednesday, with the number of daily active users tanking about 20% from Saturday, and the time spent for users was down 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 said. “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.’”

Threads was not developed to be a standalone platform. It is dependent on Instagram; the picture and short-form video platform of Meta with about 500 million users.

The drop in its engagement numbers was also confirmed by data from Similarweb, a digital data and analytics company. Similarweb noted that Threads saw a dropoff of more than 25% in daily active users between its July 7 peak and Monday, July 10 for Threads users on Android phones worldwide.

According to data from Similarweb, the usage time of the app decreased significantly, with the average time spent by U.S. users dropping from approximately 20 minutes on July 6 to slightly over 8 minutes on July 10, representing a decline of more than half.

“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, told CNBC, adding, “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 was launched on July 5, making it premature to judge its future by current user metrics. But compared to other platforms whose growth was rated as superfast, the Twitter’s competitor is believed to have an edge over others in the competition. Based on internal company data viewed by The Verge, within just one day of its launch, Threads had already accumulated over 95 million posts and 190 million likes posted by users – serving advertisers irresistible bait.

Before Threads showed up, OpenAI’s ChatGPT was the fastest-growing platform with a record 100 million signups within two months after launch. Similar social media platforms are taking longer to reach the threshold, leaving them with minimal short-term ad revenue potential.

However, Threads’ services may pose a challenge to its potential to win the competition with Twitter. Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram and Threads at Meta, has made it clear that news and politics will not be given priority on the new platform. As a result, it may not fully satisfy power users seeking a direct replacement for Twitter, where these topics are often prevalent.

“Politics and hard news are inevitably going to show up on Threads – they have on Instagram as well to some extent – but we’re not going to do anything to encourage those verticals,” Mosseri wrote on Threads.

While Threads has in the early days shown the potential to steal users from Twitter, whose traffic was reportedly down 5%, in the first couple of days of peak Threads activity, maintaining the momentum depends much on offering Twitter migrants the kind of services they were used to. Some of the missing features on Threads noted by Similarweb’s Carr are hashtags and topical search.

However, Twitter’s CEO early this week, dismissed the report that the company is recording drops in traffic.

“Don’t want to leave you hanging by a thread but Twitter, you really outdid yourselves! Last week we had our largest usage day since February. There’s only ONE Twitter. You know it. I know it,” she tweeted.

The intense competition between Twitter and Threads will be defined by many factors in the future – but the number of users will lead the pack.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said following Twitter’s failure to rack up numbers that his goal is to develop a real-time online conversation platform with 1 billion users.

Jasmine Enberg, principal analyst at Insider Intelligence, said “Meta only needs 1 in 4 Instagram users to use Threads monthly for it to be as big as Twitter.”