- Similarweb has revealed that Threads went from 49.3 million to 10.3 million users in a calendar month.
- During that same month, daily active minutes plummeted from 21 minutes to just 3 minutes.
- Threads has to offer users more features in order to be a real alternative to Twitter or X.
Despite being billed as an alternative to Twitter, Threads currently resembles a rock tied to a boulder which has been dropped into the ocean near the Mariana Trench.
Arriving in the midst of rate limits, questionable decisions by Elon Musk and a constant push to monetise every aspect of the platform, Threads was meant to be a safe house for Twitter migrants. And while it was, folks quickly decided to drop the app.
Insights presented by Similarweb reveals that on 7th July there were as many as 49.3 million daily active users on Threads, according to the platform’s estimates for the Android platform. A month later, by 7th August this number had plummeted to 10.3 million daily active users.
Worse still, those who are on the app are spending less time on it. Similarweb’s analysis highlights that daily active minutes dropped from 21 minutes on 7th July to 3 minutes by 7th August.
By comparison, Twitter still has an average use time of 25 minutes and over 100 million daily active users.
“Threads arrived on the scene during the latest flurry of controversies at Twitter, which had not yet rebranded itself as X but had annoyed active users with rate limits on posts, giving them extra incentive to look at an alternative. Threads may still have a better chance of becoming ‘the new Twitter’ than some other alternatives, but it needs to provide its users with more reasons to keep coming back,” writes Similarweb.
One thing Threads desperately needs is a web interface which Zuckerberg recently indicated would be “coming soon” as would search. Search is rather important as it would allow users to follow certain conversations, something that isn’t currently possible on Threads right now.
Post by @zuckView on Threads
Other features that will arrive soon on Threads include a new mention button, the ability to share a Threads post to an Instagram DM and the ability to customise alt-text for images and video.
Whether these features will bring users back to the app remains to be seen but Meta has to do something if it doesn’t want a limp noodle of a social network on its hands.
[Image – David Mark from Pixabay]
