Twitter's new competitor Threads, created by Mark Zuckerberg's Meta, saw remarkable success after its launch. It crossed over 100 million users and became the fastest-growing app ever. However, a new report suggests that the usage has dropped by half from the initial surge witnessed around its launch.
A report by data-tracking site Similar Web says that the number of daily active users has dropped from 49 million to 23.6 million in a week, meaning people who rushed to sign up aren't coming back regularly.
The report says that on its best day, July 7, Threads had more than 49 million daily users on Android, worldwide. By Friday, July 14, the app was down to 23.6 million active users. The report said that Thread's audience is about 22 per cent the size of Twitter's.
"Threads is missing many basic features and still needs to offer a compelling reason to switch from Twitter or start a new social media habit with Threads," the group wrote.
However, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was unaffected by the data and expressed his optimism about the platform.
"Early growth was off the charts, but more importantly 10s of millions of people now come back daily," he wrote. "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 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."
A similar Web report also stated that Twitter user retention has also been declining.
On Threads, people can post text and links and reply to or repost messages from others. The app will let users port over their existing follower lists and account names from Instagram, Meta's photo and video-sharing app that counts major brands, celebrities and creators among its more than 2 billion users.