News/Commentary

Zuckerberg’s Threads app unravels: Usage drops off cliff for 2nd consecutive week, down 70% from peak

July 23, 2023 | | Print Article

Mark Zuckerberg’s Threads app is rapidly hemorrhaging daily users, therefore putting pressure on Meta, its parent company, to add new features.

“For a second week in a row, the number of daily active users declined on Threads, falling to 13 million, down about 70% from a July 7 peak,” The Wall Street Journal reported Friday, citing data from the market intelligence firm Sensor Tower.

In addition, the average time that users spend browsing threads on their iOS or Android phone decreased from 19 minutes to just a paltry four.

“The average time spent for Android users in the U.S. dropped to five minutes from a peak of 21 minutes on launch day,” the Journal further notes.

Meanwhile, Threads’ primary competitor, Twitter, continues to draw roughly 200 million active users per day, with the average time spent on it being 30 minutes.

Keep in mind that Twitter is accessible by phone AND desktop. In fact, anybody with access to a web browser can use it. The same is not true of Threads, which for the time being is restricted only to users with either an iPhone or Android phone.

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That being said, the Journal notes that Meta executives aren’t particularly concerned about the decline in daily users, as they’d expected the drop and are working on new features to entice new users to join and current users to stay.

“They have signaled 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,” according to the Journal.

Critics hope one of those features might possibly be a desktop port.

“Meta has not confirmed whether it’s working on a web app to make Threads available through a web browser. But every single major social media app – such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter – is available through a web browser, so we imagine it’s only a matter of time until Thread expands to desktop,” as reported by Trusted Reviews.

A number of Twitter users have noted in recent days how they’d like to switch to Threads but can’t until a desktop port arrives:

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However, for the time being Threads has given no indication that a desktop version is incoming.

In a Threads video published Thursday, Adam Mosseri of Meta reportedly said some of the features they’re currently working on include support for multiple accounts, the ability to edit posts, and chronological feeds.

“It’s clear by the drop-off [in daily users] that people are seeing they can’t do as much [on Threads], and there are certain things that they want to be able to do that perhaps they can do on other apps,” Richard Hanna, a professor at Babson College who studies social-media strategy and digital marketing, told the Journal.

The good news for Thread fans is that “analysts” expect it to fare just fine as time progresses.

“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,” according to the Journal.

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“Meta definitely has the patience, they have the money, and they have the engineering talent,” one analyst, Debra Aho Williamson of market research firm Insider Intelligence, said to the paper.

But not everybody agrees. Dissident Stanford School of Medicine Professor Jay Bhattacharya, who signed the Great Barrington Declaration, believes Threads will never catch up with Twitter so long as it remains committed to its censorious ways.

His point, published in a tweet posted on Friday, was rooted in example after example after example of Threads censoring anyone who’s not a raging leftist.

Case in point (*Language warning):

Vivek Saxena
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