Threads popularity drops by half since launch, says Report

Twitter rival Threads has started to lose the potential user base that it witnessed during the initial days of the launch, a report by web analytics company SimilarWeb stated. The app's engagement time is gradually coming down after a blockbuster first week. Republic had earlier reported that Threads had become the fastest mobile application to reach 150 million downloads in just six days.

What does the SimilarWeb data reveal?

As per the report, the engagement has declined post initial highs despite the status of being the fastest growing application. The daily active users declined from 49 million on July 7 to 23.6 million on July 14th. The United States, which at the time saw the highest engagement, saw user engagement going downwards from 21 minutes per day to just seven minutes.

“Our 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, dialing in performance, and improving ranking,” Adam Mosseri, Instagram head shared in a thread post last week.

Source: SimilarWeb

He further added that the company is also dealing with other issues around spam and focussed on putting rate limits and other protections to the app.

“Spam attacks have picked up so we're going to have to get tighter on things like rate limits, which is going to mean more unintentionally limiting active people (false positives)," he added.

SimilarWeb report adds that Threads was off to a strong start so as to race with Twitter as a rival, but it still has a long way to go towards winning the loyalty of those who consume social networking sites that are dominated by texts and articles.

Although seen as a rival to Twitter, findings also reveal that the alternatives to Twitter in the past, like Mastodon and Bluesky, did not see customers operating or coming back to the platform regularly.

SimilarWeb report said that most of Thread's rising engagement has come at the expense of Twitter. This also comes at a time when Twitter's user retention has been on the decline since last year.

Source: SimilarWeb

"In the first two full days that Threads was generally available, Thursday and Friday, web traffic to twitter.com was down 5 per cent compared with the same days of the previous week. Although traffic bounced back, for the most recent 7 days of data it’s still down 11 per cent year-over-year," wrote David F. Carr, senior insights manager at Similarweb.

The report stated that Threads maximum usage was within the US as the application is not yet available to the EU. The enthusiasm among the users in the US led to a spike in the engagement rate that was 21 minutes initially before dropping to 6 minutes.

SimilarWeb has also added that the findings of the report are based on the usage of Android operated devices as it is easier to track when compared to iOS operated devices. The number of users on the Apple platforms is expected in the coming weeks.