‘Threads’ Implosion Worsens As User Engagement Drops 70%
The absolute train wreck known as Meta’s “Threads” has gone even further off the rails, with the Wall Street Journal reporting on Friday that following an initial surge in sign-ups, the number of daily active users fell to 13 million, a drop of around 70% from its July 7 peak, according to data from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower.
What’s more, the average time spent on the iOS and Android apps has also plummeted to just four minutes from 19 minutes, with the average Android user dropping to five minutes from a peak of 21 minutes on launch day, according to data from SimilarWeb.
Meanwhile, Twitter’s got around 200 million active daily users, and the average time spent on the site is 30 minutes per day according to Sensor Tower.
Meta executives have said they expected an eventual decline after the app gained more than 100 million sign-ups within a week of its launching earlier this month. They have signalled that they don’t see the falloff as worrisome and have said they are working on additional features. Meta aims to increase the number of users and improve the experience before trying to monetize the platform. -WSJ
“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,” said Babson College professor Richard Hanna, who studies social media strategy and digital marketing.
According to some reviewers, Threads experience ‘dull’ if they simply follow the same people they do on Instagram, as some of those accounts don’t post nearly as frequently as they do on Twitter.
As part of the brand’s triage attempts, Threads on Thursday reiterated the company’s plans to add new features – and reposted a video of Meta’s Instagram unit, Adam Mosseri, who promised a laundry list of new features.
“ICYMI: we’re working on getting you those new features,” reads the Threads post, which can’t be viewed on (or embedded in) a desktop browser because Meta is run by absolute morons.
Those features allegedly include support for multiple accounts (oh boy!), the ability to edit posts and a chronological feed option like those on Instagram and Facebook.
While it is still early days for the app, it has already made initial efforts to differentiate itself from Twitter, positioning itself as a platform with a different ethos that doesn’t encourage politics or hard news.
Threads has more time to succeed than other startups because it can continue to invest in the app’s success while it adds features and fixes any issues, analysts said. “Meta definitely has the patience, they have the money, and they have the engineering talent,” said Debra Aho Williamson, principal analyst at Insider Intelligence, a market research firm. -WSJ
On Tuesday, Instagram software engineer Cameron Roth posted that the iOS version had several new features, including translation, a ‘follows’ tab on the activity feed and a new subscription feature for unfollowed users. That said, in another post on Wednesday, Roth noted that the update had been paused while the company investigates an issue with failing network requests.
Last week, Mosseri said in a post on Threads that 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, dialling in performance, and improving ranking.”
With bullshit like that, Mosseri could have a promising career in politics.
