Threads struggles to retain active users as daily user count on ‘Twitter killer’ app falls a staggering 81% and just 8 million people log on daily
- The number of people regularly logging on to Meta’s rival to Twitter has plunged
- Around 8 million log on to Threads daily compared with 44 million at its peak
- Threads was the fastest-growing app ever after its July launch, but has struggled to keep momentum since and lags way behind Twitter’s 100 million daily users
The success of Mark Zuckerberg’s Twitter rival could be hanging by a thread.
Daily users of Threads, the ‘Twitter killer’ app launched by Meta, have tanked since its record-breaking launch on July 5 – from a peak of 44 million to just 8 million.
The time people are spending on the app has also fallen sharply, according to an analysis by Sensor Tower and Similarweb.
The app initially drew 100 million users in its first five days – the fastest growth of any app in history. Users opened the app 14 times per day after its initial launch and spent an average of 19 minutes on it.
Today, the average time users spend on Threads has fallen to 2.9 minutes per day and they’re only opening it between two and three times.
Daily users of the Threads app have plunged from 44 million at launch to around eight million today. Mark Zuckerberg launched it as a rival to Twitter, which gets 100 million daily users
Twitter, which was bought by Elon Musk last year for $44 billion, has threatened to sue Meta over its Threads launch. Musk and Zuckerberg are bitter rivals and plan to have a physical fight to settle their differences
The latest figures continue a downward trend in the app’s use and will be a concern for Zuckerberg, the ninth richest person in the world with a $114 billion fortune, who hoped to capitalize on the ongoing turmoil at Twitter.
Twitter – which has more than 100 million daily active users – is currently being rebranded as X by billionaire rival Elon Musk, the world’s richest man with a $236.1 billion fortune, according to Forbes.
Twitter threatened to launch a lawsuit against Meta over claims it hired Musk’s former employees who ‘had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly confidential information’.
The billionaires’ rivalry now runs so deep they are even planning to have a physical fight to settle their differences.
Zuckerberg, 39, addressed the decline in Threads users in mid-July when separate figures also revealed it hadn’t maintained its initial popularity. He said he remained ‘optimistic’ about the future of Threads and that the figures were still ‘way ahead of what we expected’.
‘The focus for the rest of the year is improving the basics and retention,’ Zuckerberg said in a post to Threads.
In a Threads post in mid-July Zuckerberg acknowledged falling user numbers since Threads record-breaking launch and said a focus for the remainder of 2023 was ‘improving retention’
The latest figures continue a downward trend in the app’s usage figures and will be a concern for Zuckerberg, the ninth richest person in the world with a $114 billion fortune, who hoped to capitalize on the ongoing turmoil at Twitter
‘It’ll take time to stabilize, but once we nail that then we’ll focus on growing the community. We’ve run this playbook many times (FB, IG, Stories, Reels, etc) and I’m confident Threads is on a good path too.’
Daily users are a key metric for social media platforms to secure advertisers.
Twitter has lost around 50 percent of its advertising revenue since Musk, 52, bought the company for $44 billion in October 2022. X Corp., its parent company, recently filed a lawsuit against the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a non-profit, over claims it ’embarked on a scare campaign to drive away advertisers from the platform.’
In the first two full days that Threads was available, traffic to twitter.com was down five percent compared with the same days the week prior, an analysis revealed.
Traffic eventually bounced back, but was down around 11 percent on last year across an analysis of a week in mid-July.
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