Despite the sharp decline in its users, Mark Zuckerberg, head of Meta, challenged Twitter again, saying that there is a need for an application for public conversations that attracts a billion users, and that Twitter has failed this task so far.
Social media app Threads, which is owned by Meta, has seen a nearly 70% drop in daily active users since its July 7 peak, according to market news firm Sensor Tower, spoiling their explosive launch just two weeks ago and pale in comparison to the social media giant’s Twitter glow.
Threads has nearly 13 million daily active users, down from 44 million on July 7, and the average daily time a user spends on the app is four minutes, which is down from the launch-day peak of 19 minutes, according to Sensor Tower.
Mark Zuckerberg is the head of Meta and Elon Musk is the head of Twitter
This comes after the company reported that it recorded 100 million sign-ups within a week after launching the platform on July 5.
In comparison, Twitter has around 200 million daily active users and the average time a user spends on the platform is 30 minutes. The two social media platforms work similarly, but Threads is missing some important features in favor of Twitter, including desktop functionality and the ability to search for topics rather than just users.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Meta executives said they expect a decline in usage and are planning new features to keep users on the app.
Threads launched on July 5, allowing users to sign up with their accounts from Meta’s other social media platform. With more than 2 billion monthly users, the popularity of Instagram likely helped drive early sign-ups to Threads.
During the first two days after the launch of Threads, web traffic on Twitter dropped by 5% compared to the previous week, the newspaper reported.
However, Sensor Tower said it has not seen a substantive change in Twitter traffic since Threads launched.
For his part, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, said that Threads is an attempt by his company to seize opportunities in the market that Twitter has always enjoyed.
“I think there should be a public conversation app with more than a billion people,” Zuckerberg wrote in a post on his new app. “Twitter had the opportunity to do that but the platform didn’t make it. We hope to do it.”
