Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is reporting that users of Threads, which was created in direct competition to Twitter and launched only on July 5th, have already fallen by more than half.
The just over three-week-old social media platform broke records with its sign-ups, rocketing up to 100 million users within five days of launching. Threads users were happy to see an alternative to what Twitter (now known as X) has become lately or perhaps were just curious as to what Meta could bring to the concept. Either way, the excitement appears to have faded, with Meta reporting that over half of their Threads users have now left the platform.
A caveat to signing up for a Threads account was that it was intrinsically tied to your Instagram account, therefore leaving one meant leaving the other. This doesn’t seem to have stopped over half of the resulting users from leaving the platform.
“If you have more than 100 million people sign up, ideally it would be awesome if all of them, or even half of them, stuck around. We’re not there yet,” Mark Zuckerberg told his staff. The call was heard by the Reuters news agency and therefore released to the public. He reportedly continued that the situation was “normal” and that he expected retention to improve in the future as new features on the app were released.
Threads was marketed as a “safe space for advertising” so it’s bound to be worrying for affiliate marketers to see the app stumble so quickly. Threads was seen as not only a competitor to Twitter but without the baggage that Twitter’s current state has, such as hateful and adult content that is not suitable for advertising purposes. If the Threads upload does pick up, you can move into the Twitter alternative permanently as another social media account to post on… but we’ll have to wait to find out.
