Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s Instagram Threads, which some say could rival Elon Musk’s Twitter, has seen a drop-off in users and engagements in recent days after a relatively strong showing in early July, according to analytics companies.
“The Threads launch really did ‘break the internet,’ or at least the Sensor Tower models,” Anthony Bartolacci, the managing director at Sensor Tower, a marketing intelligence firm, told CNBC.
Bartolacci added that “in the 10-plus years Sensor Tower has been estimating app installs, the first 72 hours of Threads was truly in a class by itself.”
In a statement, Mr. Zuckerberg said on July 10 that Threads was able to obtain about 100 million users in about a week. “That’s mostly organic demand, and we haven’t even turned on many promotions yet,” the Facebook founder said in a Threads post.
At the same time, Matthew Prince, CEO of internet infrastructure firm Cloudflare, shared a graph showing a similar trajectory in a tweet on July 10 and claimed Twitter’s traffic was “tanking.” But Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino wrote Monday that the platform last week had its “largest usage day” since February. “There’s only ONE Twitter,” she tweeted.
However, since Threads—billed by some legacy news outlets as a “Twitter killer”—launched on July 5, there has been a serious drop in user engagement, according to Sensor Tower.
For example, according to Sensor Tower, on Tuesday and Wednesday, Threads’ number of daily active users was down 20 percent from Saturday. More seriously, the time spent by a user was down 50 percent, from 20 minutes to 10 minutes in that same time period, the company told CNBC.
“These early returns signal that despite the hoopla during its launch, it will still be an uphill climb for Threads to carve out space in most users’ social network routine,” Mr. Bartolacci said. “The backing of Meta and the integration with Instagram likely gives Threads a much higher flood than other services, but it will need a more compelling value proposition than simply ‘Twitter, but without Elon Musk.’”
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