Revisiting Threads: How Is It Doing?
Zuckerberg’s Threads app was once in the buzz. But what happened since July when it was first introduced?
Now, we decided to revisit it to see how it’s doing. Here’s what we found out.
Numbers aren’t too encouraging
Currently, there are 130 million Threads users. Despite the number seeming like a good one, the trend behind it is not so encouraging. While it took the platform 4 days and 6 hours to reach 100 million users, since then it has attracted only 30 million new users.
The retention rate is likewise not great. In August, Similarweb and Sensor Tower reported that app engagement decreased significantly. The app’s daily active user count was down 82% from launch as of July 31, with just eight million users accessing the app daily.
A report by another company, Similar data, was in line with these findings. It showed that about 50 million users entered Threads daily at the beginning of July. In mid-August, the number of new users dropped by about 10 million.
The amount of time spent in the app – another important indicator for assessing the app’s performance – also decreased from 21 minutes to under 3 minutes today.
How come this is happening?
Not least because of the platform’s partial functionality. As a result, Zuckerberg announced on Threads in September that the platform is introducing a desktop version as well as enabling search and rolling out to most English and Spanish-speaking countries today, adding “more to come soon.”
The thread was complemented by a gif with Vin Diesel and a line “I bet you gonna enjoy this.”
Zuckerberg’s thread. Source: Threads app
Has this announcement generated excitement?
Hard to tell as most of the responses featured different users asking for money. One of them, yattii91, was particularly insistent, saying that “Mr @zuck i don't want any fame or something like that you know everything about me through fb insta and now here i am not that kind of guy or social media guy i am just requesting you to give me 2M$ for a good cause trust me ?”
Meanwhile, other users seem to be upset by what they describe as “big tech’s censorship” relating to the COVID-19 search.
Though Zuckerberg told Meta that “the search functionality temporarily doesn’t provide results for keywords that may show potentially sensitive content,” and will only allow certain words once they are “confident in the quality of the results”, others were quick to point out that “– ya know, because it’s not like they’ve lied in the past.
But it doesn’t seem like Elon Musk, who wanted to cage-fight Zuckerberg, is ready to forget about his main competitor at the moment.
A recent analysis by Markup showed that links that lead to Musk’s competitors including Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Bluesky, and Substack still take a surprisingly long time to load a few bytes of data.
Previously, Gagarin News reported that Dorsey shrugged off Zuckerberg.
