Daily Users and Usage Time Significantly Decrease
Lack of Special Features... "Still Need to Watch a Bit More"
Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has seen the popularity of its new social media (SNS) platform, Threads, wane.
Threads is a text-based SNS targeting Twitter, which attracted explosive interest by surpassing 100 million users just five days after its launch on the 5th. Mark Zuckerberg, Meta's CEO, even stated that "it far exceeds our expectations."
Threads was built on Meta's popular platform Instagram. Users can easily log in with just an Instagram account. Jasmine Enberg, senior analyst at market research firm Insider Intelligence, said, "If just one in four of the 2 billion Instagram users signs up, Threads could grow as large as Twitter."
However, according to global mobile data analytics platform SensorTower on the 21st (local time), the daily active users of Threads have declined for two consecutive weeks. The current daily active user count is 13 million, a 70% drop compared to the 7th.
The time users spend on the Threads app has also significantly decreased. The average time users spend on the Threads app on iOS and Android dropped from 19 minutes to 4 minutes.
Statistics site Similarweb showed a similar trend. The average time U.S. Android users spent on Threads fell from a peak of 21 minutes on launch day to 5 minutes.
In contrast, Twitter, identified as Threads’ competitor, maintains about 200 million daily active users. The average daily usage time is also around 30 minutes.
The decline in Threads users is attributed to a lack of "special features." Richard Hanna, a professor researching social media strategy and digital marketing at Babson College, said, "People are realizing that they can’t do many things on Threads that they can do on other apps."
Popular YouTuber Casper Lee, who has 6.6 million subscribers, also pointed out, "There is a lack of features that would help users gain additional followers beyond their existing ones."
Since its launch on the 18th, Threads has updated its features for the first time, adding a follows tab that makes it easy to see who is following you, and a translation feature that allows reading text in other languages.
However, features like one-on-one direct messaging (DM) and hashtags, which exist on Twitter, have not yet been included. Some features have also been delayed due to technical issues.
Nevertheless, Lee added, "We need to watch for a few more weeks," and described Threads as "the handsome new transfer student everyone wants to talk to."
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