Threads may have been a flash in the pan after all. Meta’s answer to Twitter, as we covered previously, experienced a significant surge during its first week. Today, traffic to the new social media platform appears to have all but died.
PC Mag reported that web traffic to the Threads Android app dropped by more than 50%. However, we’re unsure how accurate the numbers are from SimilarWeb, a tool that charts web traffic.
Based on the SimilarWeb numbers, the Android user base shrank from 49 million to just under 24 million over a week. Here are the blog’s “key takeaways” from the data:
- On its best day, July 7, Threads had more than 49 million daily active users on Android, worldwide, according to Similarweb estimates. That’s about 45% of the usage of Twitter, which had more than 109 million active Android users that day.
- By Friday, July 14, Threads was down to 23.6 million active users, or about 22% of Twitter’s audience.
- Usage in the US, which saw the most activity, peaked at about 21 minutes of engagement with the app on July 7. By July 14, that was down to a little over 6 minutes.
- In the first two full days that Threads was generally available, Thursday and Friday, web traffic to twitter.com was down 5% compared with the same days of the previous week. Although traffic bounced back, for the most recent 7 days of data it’s still down 11% year-over-year.
- On the days of peak interest in Threads, Twitter’s Daily active users on Android, worldwide were virtually unchanged, but time spent was down 4.3% – perhaps because some users were off trying Threads. Even with that drop, however, the average total time spent on Twitter was about 25 minutes.
The tracker does not provide info from users on Apple’s iOS. So, it’s hard to tell how the numbers are doing across the board.
Regardless, seeing such a drop from one of the two most used smartphones on the market is worrisome. Although, it’s not surprising.
As a social media platform, Threads isn’t exactly breaking new ground. Meta isn’t exactly known for keeping your information private, so starting a new account or linking an existing Instagram to Threads has potential issues.
Also, the experience is almost too similar to Twitter, but without the robust userbase, features, and readily available analytics.
[Source: PC Mag]