Threads has seen a significant drop in daily active users since launching on July 5th. Meta’s Twitter competitor came out swinging but hasn’t been able to retain users for a number of reasons.
A SimilarWeb report has been released following Threads’ first week on the iOS and Android market. It’s shown that by Friday, July 7th, Meta was showing signs that it had the secret sauce to contend with Twitter. As platforms like Mastodon and BlueSky failed to compete on a high level, Threads had a lot going for it. Though, the honeymoon phase appears to be dwindling.
Much of SimilarWeb‘s stats stem from usage on Android. It’s shown that on July 7th, Threads has more than 49 million daily active users. This figure equates to roughly 45 percent of the usage on Twitter, which had over 109 million active Android users that day. Threads was quickly criticized for not having a follower feed, GIFs, hashtags, and other discovery tools. By July 14th, SimilarWeb estimates that the daily active user base on Threads dropped to 23.6 million, around 22 percent of Twitter’s audience.
Threads had mass adoption during those early days. In the US specifically, usage peaked at around 21 minutes of engagement on the app by July 7th. Flashforward a week later, that figure dropped to a mere six minutes.
SimilarWeb also provides a bit more context as to have big of a pull Meta’s Twitter competitor has in the first 48 hours. Throughout July 6th and July 7th, web traffic to Twitter’s site was down five percent when compared to the same days a week prior. While traffic has since returned, it’s still down 11 percent year-over-year.
Last week, head of Instagram Adam Mosseri stated that the Threads team has been “entirely focused on keeping the lights on and fixing bugs.” However, many “obvious” features are on the way. This includes a following feed, an edit button, and post search functions.
It’ll be interesting to see if these features will help draw usage back over from Threads or if the app will see the same fate as other budding Twitter competitors and become a fad of the week.
SimilarWeb states that figures pertaining to iOS should be available in the next short while.
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Threads hasn’t existed long enough to establish a baseline to report on this metric. Everyone created an account at the same time. That doesn’t make them daily active users.
the reason i have threads but dont use it… i use IG. why do i need threads again? the same reason why i barely touch twitter. twitter is way faster at reporting news though. i love peel region police reports.