After a perfect take-off that saw 100 million users joining in five days, Meta Platforms’ Threads is now focussing on usage figures. There have been reports that Threads usage has slowed down but Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg remains “optimistic”.
The CEO has said: “Early growth was off the charts, but more importantly 10s of millions of people now come back daily. That’s way ahead of what we expected. The focus for the rest of the year is improving the basics and retention. It’ll take time to stabilise, 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.”
Surpassing 100 million users (some say that the figure now stands at 150 million) is a milestone because Threads has reached the figure faster than even ChatGPT, which took two months to hit the spot.
New data from app intelligence firm data.ai show that Threads has achieved one-fifth of the weekly active user base of Twitter worldwide and 86 times the weekly active user base of Truth Social, which had a weekly active user base of one million as of last week. The data arrives close on the heels of information shared by the app intelligence firm Sensor Tower late last week. It said that Threads’ daily active users declined on Tuesday and Wednesday (last week) — down around 20 per cent from Saturday. Time spent was down by 50 per cent, from 20 minutes to 10 minutes. CNBC also reports that data from Similarweb show a similar trend.
Threads power from India
But all this doesn’t mean that momentum for Threads has slowed down. Data.ai says that the app has achieved over 150 million downloads, by its current estimates — which is 5.5 times faster than Niantic’s Pokémon GO, which had held the record for largest app launch title since its July 2016 debut. Further, India is leading when it comes to downloading of the new app, making up 33 per cent of global downloads, followed by Brazil at 22 per cent and the US at 16 per cent. We also need to remember that Threads is not available in the EU at the moment because regulatory issues connected with data collection practices.
The growth of Threads comes at a time when Elon Musk, owner of Twitter, has said that advertising revenue for his platform has dropped 50 per cent amid a “heavy debt load”. He said that Twitter continues to have a “negative cash flow”.
To ensure interest in Twitter is maintained, the platform has started paying creators a share of the ad revenue. The programme’s payouts appear significant but it has come with its share of controversy. The Washington Post has reported that early beneficiaries include high-profile far-right influencers who tweeted before the announcement how much they’ve earned as part of the programme.
But comparing Threads with Twitter is not an apples-to-apples comparison. Adam Mosseri, head of both Instagram and Threads at Meta, has said that he does not plan to prioritise news or politics on the new platform. “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,” he wrote on Threads.
Mathures Paul