First announced on July 7, the platform’s downloads soared. How is the platform faring two weeks later?
First announced on July 7, the new social media platform, Threads, hit a record amount of downloads. But just two weeks post-launch, the app is taking a swan dive as the number of active users plummets and the average time on the app drops.
Only available as an app, it reached 100 million downloads in the first five days, breaking records for the explosion of sign-ups on any app ever and was presented as a direct competitor to Twitter, reported Deseret News.
It’s been two weeks, and a report from The Wallstreet Journal shows that the number of active users has dropped to only 13 million — a 70% decrease since its launch.
Comparatively, Twitter has about 200 million daily active users, per Business Insider. Which composes a large gap to make up for Threads.
Not only are fewer people active two weeks after the launch, they are also less engaged with the Threads app than they were in the beginning.
Another report by WSJ showed that the amount of time users spend on the app is declining too. Engagement dropped to more than half of the original 19 minutes to 4 minutes per user. Twitter stays constant at an average of 30 minutes a day for each user.
“It’s clear by the drop-off that people are seeing they can’t do as much, and there are certain things that they want to be able to do that perhaps they can do on other apps,” Richard Hanna, a professor at Babson College who studies social-media strategy and digital marketing, told WSJ.
The app is missing things like a way to search by topic and find trending ideas, which could ultimately be hurting its ability to keep people engaged. But, on the bright side, it also has come off as more approachable than Twitter for several staff members at Deseret News.
Signups for the app continue to increase, but only time will tell what happens to the new platform.