They rushed to sign up, but they’re not hanging around much.
The number of daily active users on Meta’s Threads has plunged about 70% since the purported Twitter killer’s July 7 peak engagement, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday, citing estimates from market tracker Sensor Tower.
The average amount of time that users spend on the Thread apps for both iPhones and Androids also decreased, to 4 minutes from 19 minutes, the report said. The app is not yet available in a desktop version.
The decline includes a drop to an average 5 minutes of user engagement from a peak of 21 minutes on July 5, the day the Instagram-linked microblogging site launched, The Journal reported, citing website traffic analytics firm SimilarWeb.
Daily active users on Twitter remain at about 200 million, and average time spent on the app is at 30 minutes a day, the report said, citing Sensor Tower estimates.
Social media users looking for an alternative to Elon Musk’s Twitter flocked to Threads en masse, sending the new platform to 100 million signups in the first week. The platform’s interface is similar to Twitter but lacks some of the functionality.
In fact, the similarities led Musk to threaten to sue Meta.
Meta executives have suggested the drop in user activity is not a major concern for the platform it had all but shelved, then revived when Musk’s buyout of Twitter presented an opportunity to draw in a new user base — offering a place that Instagram chief Adam Mosseri said would provide “a less angry place for conversations” that focuses less on politics and news than the daily exchanges on Twitter.
Mosseri was featured in a video posted Thursday that promised new features for the app, including support for multiple accounts, the ability to edit posts and a chronological feed option that mirrors those on Instagram and Facebook.
But The Journal noted that the rollout of some new features for iOs, the Apple operating system, including translation, a “follows” tab and a new subscription feature for unfollowed users, was delayed last week by a technical issue.
Meta has said it is also working on more features for the app.
The “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, dialing in performance, and improving ranking,” Mosseri said in a post last week.
Meta wants to drive up user numbers and improve the platform before trying to monetize it, The Journal reported.