Threads has lost half of its daily active users a week after launch

Threads, Instagram’s new Twitter competitor, experienced a heck of a launch week, crossing over 100 million users and becoming the fastest-growing app ever.

However, all good things must come to an end. Well, at least when it comes to hype dying down after we all initially get excited about the new thing. According to a new report from SimilarWeb, the number of daily active users on Threads has been cut in half when compared to its launch week. The app has dropped from 49 million to 23.6 million daily active users in just one week.

It’s interesting to see Threads hit 49 million daily active users at its peak as the analytics firm says that Twitter sits at around 109 million, meaning that Threads briefly almost achieved half of the size of Twitter on its best day so far. Below are the key takeaways from the report:

• On its best day, July 7, Threads had more than 49 million daily active users on Android, worldwide, according to Similarweb estimates. That’s about 45% of the usage of Twitter, which had more than 109 million active Android users that day.
• By Friday, July 14, Threads was down to 23.6 million active users, or about 22% of Twitter’s audience.
• Usage in the US, which saw the most activity, peaked at about 21 minutes of engagement with the app on July 7. By July 14, that was down to a little over 6 minutes.
• In the first two full days that Threads was generally available, Thursday and Friday, web traffic to twitter.com was down 5% compared with the same days of the previous week. Although traffic bounced back, for the most recent 7 days of data it’s still down 11% year-over-year.
• On the days of peak interest in Threads, Twitter’s Daily active users on Android, worldwide, were virtually unchanged, but time spent was down 4.3% – perhaps because some users were off trying Threads. Even with that drop, however, the average total time spent on Twitter was about 25 minutes.

While many think that Threads could be the first “Twitter killer” to actually have a shot of achieving such a feat, the app has a way to go to ever dream of getting there. After its launch week, Threads sits at about a fifth the size of Twitter and about the same when it comes to daily active users.

The app is already starting to see some of the same problems that plague Twitter like spam accounts so, just like Musk, Mosseri announced today that the company will be getting more strict on rate limits. Hopefully, they’ll be able to roll those restrictions out better than Twitter did which ironically led to Thread’s early release.

Post by @mosseri

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While Threads certainly commands the title of the most successful launch of a social media app we’ve ever seen, it now has to maintain that growth over time while competing with what will be a fierce competitor. We’ll see how it goes!