The Threads phenomenon fades in just one month of life. Mark Zuckerberg's promising social network that came to market with the ambition of replacing Twitter broke all-time records for downloads. In just five days, the app managed to surpass 100 million registrations, boosted by the easy synchronization of data from Instagram users.
This is a milestone not even reached by the famous artificial intelligence platform ChatGPT and a job that took Twitter more than five years.
However, the millions of downloads are of little use if the user does not use the platform afterwards. And that is what has happened to Threads, which has failed to retain user interest beyond the first few weeks. According to data from Similarweb – a large group specializing in data analysis – the number of active users per day has fallen by 79% between July 7 and August 7, from 49.3 to 10.3 millions.
Another piece of information reflects the lack of attractiveness: the time Internet users spend browsing the web has fallen from 14 to 3 minutes in four weeks. On Twitter, which has more than 100 million daily active users, the average browsing time is 25 minutes.
So the spectacular download figures have turned out to be a mirage. "Zuckerberg is on his way to scoring another failure after the dubious commitment to the metaverse, which is advancing but more discreetly than the market expected," says Enrique San Juan, a consultant specializing in social networks.
Why Threads is not convincing? San Juan considers that the social network does not provide any remarkable news. The objective of the application – which has reached a hundred countries, except in the European Union, where privacy rules have turned out to be too strict for Meta – is to become a global forum for the exchange of ideas and news, focusing in professional content creators.
But the formula it has designed has turned out to be very similar to that of Twitter and the service it wants to provide is already covered by other platforms. “It is very difficult to change digital habits, society is increasingly selective when it comes to committing to an application, so it is difficult to change habits if the product is not really new. And, for now, the needs to inform, socialize or entertain are already covered in other applications”, he reasons.
At the same time, the little interest that Threads has generated so far is being interpreted as a success for Twitter, now called X. “Since practically the year it was born, this social network has always seemed like it was going to die and yet, it resists better than anyone”, he points out. Despite the changes recently introduced by Elon Musk, user loyalty is still very high.
In fact, this same year Twitter has resisted the launch of other potential rivals: the Bluesky network, promoted by the creator of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, as well as the Mastodon network, free access software that has not convinced the market either.
Threads' future is still uncertain but the data shows that the spectacular rise will likely lead to a spectacular fall.
