Meta's Threads is created to compete with Twitter amid the online battle between Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk.
Zuck aims to surpass the newly-rebranded X Blue as the app recorded over 30 million sign-ups during its launch. However, its short-lived engagement is showing up as its user count steadily declines each week.
Meta Struggles to Retain Threads Users
Even only a few days after its successful launch, many people think that Threads will actually make more revenue than Twitter. The hype lasted for a few weeks until Meta noticed that more users are leaving the platform for good.
According to CNN, the latest data released by Sensor Tower and Similarweb suggests that Meta is currently struggling to keep up with X's pace.
As of July 31, the daily active users in Threads sharply declined by 82%. This means that only eight million people are using the app every day. This is still lower compared to what Meta projected to see, which is nearly 44 million users.
According to Sensor Tower, Threads users are spending less time on the app this time. The average time spent scrolling on Threads accounts to 19 minutes on its launch day, not to mention the average time the user opens an app which is 14 times.
Unfortunately, the experts are seeing a declining pattern in these numbers. Per Sensor Tower's senior insights analyst Abe Yousef, the daily average time spent on the app reaches an all-time low of 2.9 minutes per day. In-app usage, people are reportedly spending just 2.6 sessions on Threads.
Another company Similarweb revealed that on July 7, roughly 49 million people accessed Threads. Again, this number did not sustain and it continued to fall off to over 11 million in just 22 days.
Steepest Drop-Off on Threads Users
Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg is aware that the company needs to improve its app retention to attract more customers in the long run.
According to Quartz, more than half of Threads users have already abandoned the app. Zuckerberg says that in order to improve app engagement, new features are expected to roll out in the next few weeks.
At the moment, a steady plunge of roughly 1% per day is observed among the daily active users on the platform. Sensor Tower says that it's the steepest drop-off since the app's debut.
Despite this, Zuckerberg is still optimistic that Threads will recover from these low numbers.
"We saw unprecedented growth out of the gate and more importantly we're seeing more people coming back daily than I'd expected. And now, we're focused on retention and improving the basics. And then after that, we'll focus on growing the community to the scale we think is possible," he said.
Back on July 10, the tech entrepreneur announced that over 100 million sign-ups were recorded on Threads. It even surpassed ChatGPT when it comes to the same benchmark.
Although this was impressive at the very beginning, Zuck acknowledged the fact that not all 100 million users who signed up returned to the platform.
