Threads, is Twitter-X’s rival already doomed or not?
Threads, the rival Twitter app launched by Meta, has seen a nearly 70% drop in its number of daily active users since its July 7 peak, according to market intelligence firm Sensor Tower. But it's still too early to declare the competitor out of contention, according to Techcrunch.
Just two weeks after its explosive debut, the number of active users on Threads, Twitter's rival Meta app, is plummeting and average time on the app is declining.
While the social platform owned by Elon Musk is preparing to say goodbye to the historic logo with the blue bird and is aiming for a rebranding with an X , we are wondering about the future of the rival app launched by the giant Meta (Mark Zuckerberg's company that owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp). Zuckerberg has made it no secret that Threads is his company's attempt to capture the market Twitter has long enjoyed.
An article in the Wall Street Journal last Friday warned that Threads, Twitter's new competitor on Instagram, is already losing ground. Citing data from the company Sensor Tower, it reports that the number of daily active users on Thread fell for the second week to 13 million, a 70% drop from its high point on July 7. By comparison, Twitter's daily active users number around 200 million. Not only are there fewer people active two weeks after launch, but they're also less engaged with the Threads app than they were at the start.
However, despite this seemingly worrying trend, it's still too early to shut Thread out of games, notes tech magazine TechCrunch . By other metrics, the app is continuing to grow its user base and traction in global markets, which, over time, could also increase its usage, especially as the app's feature set improves.
All the details.
COMPARISON NUMBERS
Threads has about 13 million daily active users, down from 44 million on July 7, and average daily time spent on the app is four minutes, which is down from its launch day peak of 19 minutes, according to Sensor Tower. This comes after the company reported it had hit 100 million signups within a week of its July 5 launch.
At the same time, Twitter has about 200 million daily active users, and the average time spent on the platform daily is 30 minutes, according to Sensor Tower.
During the first two days after Threads' launch, Twitter's web traffic dropped 5% from the previous week, the Journal also reported. However, Sensor Tower said it hasn't seen a major change in Twitter traffic since the launch of Threads.
THE POSITION OF GOAL
But the giant founded by Zuckerberg does not seem to care about these numbers at the moment. Meta executives said they expect usage to drop and are planning new features to keep users on the app, the Wall Street Journal reported.
WHAT FUTURE FOR META'S NEO APP?
According to TechCrunch , what's certain now is that Threads is still too new and too incomplete to make any kind of determination about its ultimate fate. Could it be a first record that ultimately fails? Safe. But it could also be a legitimate Twitter killer or mid-level hit. It's too early to tell, the American magazine reiterates.
While Thread's usage may have declined for now, as data from Sensor Tower shows, its early usage numbers have demonstrated its potential as a rival to Twitter. In its early days on the market, Thread users spent an average of 15 minutes a day on the app, across 9.4 app sessions. That's more than the average for the "microblogging" category, which according to data.ai includes Twitter, Truth Social, Mastodon, and Bluesky. Microblogging users then spent an average of 12.5 minutes a day in 7.8 app sessions, TechCrunch reports.
It should also not be forgotten that over the years Meta has not had a history of new successful apps having closed almost everything it has built ( the latest example is the podcast platform launched to compete with Spotify and closed definitively in 2022 less than a year after its launch ). So Threads, could one day become just another app added to its graveyard, TechCrunch argues, adding that, meanwhile, an app with around 116 million users and growing is far from "dead."
What's certain at the moment is that two social media platforms work similarly, but Thread is missing some significant Twitter features, including desktop functionality and the ability to search for topics instead of just users. But even this Zuckerberg's group could soon face.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/threads-la-rivale-di-twitter-x-e-gia-spacciata-oppure-no/ on Mon, 24 Jul 2023 14:08:26 +0000.