Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on July 17 assured that "tens of millions of people" are returning to the company's text-based conversation app Threads on a daily basis. He added they now intend to focus on improving the app's "basics and retention" for the rest of the year.
Zuckerberg's comments come amid rising concerns that Threads is witnessing declining usage after a strong initial launch.
The app, launched as the company's answer to rival Twitter, clocked 100 million sign-ups in less than five days of its launch, making it the fastest-growing consumer product across the world.
However, as per the new data shared by analytics firm Similarweb, Threads saw its daily active users decline to 23.6 million on July 14, from 49 million on July 7. Also, in the United States which reportedly saw the highest activity, usage has come down to a little over 6 minutes from a peak of 21 minutes. That said, the firm notes that this data is based only on Android usage of Threads.
In a Threads post on July 17, Zuckerberg struck an optimistic note about the service's growth. "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" he said.
However, he also noted that it will take time to stabilise. "Once we nail that then we'll focus on growing the community. We've run this playbook many times (Facebook, Instagram, Stories, Reels, etc.,) and I'm confident Threads is on a good path too," Zuckerberg wrote.
Instagram head Adam Mosseri also stated in a post on July 15 that they are not particularly focused on engagement at the moment.
"Our focus right now is not engagement, which has been amazing, but getting past the initial peak and trough we see with every new product, and building new features, dialling in performance, and improving ranking" he wrote.
Rivalry with Twitter
Instagram launched Threads, at a time when many Twitter users are looking for alternative services, frustrated by various product and policy changes by Elon Musk that have dramatically reshaped how the social media platform works.
These include paid verification, pay walling certain key features, introducing daily limits on tweets viewed, and ending support for legacy APIs that effectively shuttered all third-party apps. Some of these measures appear to have been reversed since the launch of Threads.
Similarweb pointed out that there are some signs that Threads could eat directly into Twitter’s market share.
"In the first two full days that Threads was generally available, web traffic to twitter.com was down 5 percent compared with the same days of the previous week and Android app usage, by time spent, was down 4.3 percent," it stated. Traffic was down 11 percent year-on-year (YoY) for the period of July 7-14, it said.
The firm also pointed out that user retention at Twitter has been on the decline. The percentage of new users who are continuing to regularly use the Twitter app after 30 days has dropped to 16 percent in May 2023 from 19 percent in May 2022, it said.
"Meta only needs roughly 1 in 4 Instagram users to use Threads monthly to make it as big as Twitter. It already has the scale, resources, and execution strategy to make that happen," Jasmine Enberg, principal analyst at Insider Intelligence noted. As of October 2022, Instagram had 2 billion monthly active users worldwide. That said, it is still early days for Threads, which is yet to launch in the European Union due to regulatory concerns.
The service also currently lacks many basic features such as a chronological 'following-only' feed, a fully functional web interface, an edit button, the ability to support multiple accounts, and for users to search for posts on the platform. Many of these features are still in the works and will likely be rolled out in the future, Mosseri said in a recent post.
Earlier today in a separate post, Mosseri also said that Threads had to tighten up rate limits due to a rise in spam attacks on the service. This could mean that users who are active on the service could face issues accessing posts, however there are no hard limits like Twitter has imposed. Mosseri also suggested that people to reach out if they start facing these problems.
Also in the works is adding support for ActivityPub, a decentralised social networking protocol, that will make it interoperable with other apps that also support the protocol, such as Mastodon and WordPress.
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