• After an initial rush to get the new thing, Threads active user count has dipped substantially.
• By last week Friday, daily active users on Threads sat at just 23.6 million on Android.
• While Twitter remains strong, the fact that user engagement is down three percentage points year on year should be alarming.

Earlier this month Instagram launched its Twitter competitor in Threads. The platform launched to much fanfare and jubilation at Twitter’s inevitable demise.

Indeed, the fact that Threads saw 100 million signups in four days is impressive but how do things look now that the sheen has worn off somewhat? In a word, badly.

Data published by Similarweb suggests that on its best day, Threads had 49 million daily active users on Android on 7th July. This represented 45 percent of Twitter’s daily users on Android on the same day. However, by Friday 14th July, this daily active user count on Threads had dropped to 23.6 million

Part of Threads’ initial success, as many have pointed out, is the fact that if users had an Instagram account, they could immediately populate their following and follower base.

“To a large extent, Threads solves the ’empty party problem’ that makes it tough to start a new online community by allowing Instagram users to instantly create a Threads account, bringing their existing contacts with them. Our daily usage numbers make Meta’s claim of having achieved more than 100 million total account signups in a matter of days seem reasonable. However, Threads is missing many basic features and still needs to offer a compelling reason to switch from Twitter or start a new social media habit with Threads,” writes Similarweb.

During the first two days of Threads’ availability web traffic to Twitter was only down five percent compared to the previous week. That said, Similarweb does point out that traffic to Twitter is down 11 percent compared to the same time in 2022.

This should – and likely is – ringing alarm bells over at Twitter. New users who use the app after 30 days dropped from 19 percent in May 2022 to 16 percent in May 2023. While this is only a three percentage point drop, it’s indicative of a growing frustration with Elon Musk and the Iron Fist he runs Twitter with.

This frustration extends to advertisers. At the weekend, Musk revealed that Twitter is suffering from a “~50% drop in advertising revenue” adding that Twitter is still seeing a negative cash flow.

Despite this, Musk proclaimed a day earlier that Twitter would see an all time of “user seconds” last week, though we aren’t sure advertisers fully grasp or want to hear about “user seconds” over “daily active users”.

Twitter is puttering along then and rumours of its demise may have been exaggerated a few months back. Now that Musk is settled in however and sweeping changes are being made to the platform in a bid for profitability, we are seeing pushback.

With that having been said, if Threads can improve the platform – starting with a web interface and a choice of timelines – it could be in with a shot.