Five days after launch, Twitter's competitor Threads crossed the 100 million mark in terms of users.
On July 10, the fifth day after the launch of Facebook's parent company Meta's new app Threads, its number of users has exceeded 100 million. This growth rate broke the record for chatbot ChatGPT - the number of active users exceeded 100 million within two months of launch. Threads could become the fastest-growing consumer app in history.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg also announced the good news, "Threads reached 100 million sign-ups. It's mostly organic demand, and we haven't even run any promotions yet. I can't believe it's only been 5 days!"
Threads was released on the evening of July 5, local time, landing on Apple's iOS and Android platforms, and once launched, it gained a lot of attention and became the number one free app at the beginning of its release. Within two hours of its launch, it reached 2 million users and then steadily climbed to 5 million, 10 million, 30 million, 70 million. Zuckerberg said "this far exceeded our expectations."
In addition to the skyrocketing number of registered users, users are also starting to use the platform to post posts. Tech media outlet The Verge reported on July 7 that, according to internal data, there were more than 95 million posts and 190 million likes on Threads at the time.
It is understood that Threads is closely related to Instagram, another social software owned by Meta, and registrants need to go through an Instagram account to log in, and be able to transfer the accounts that the latter follows to the Threads account, which has more than 2 billion monthly active users, which undoubtedly fuels the expansion of Threads, Insider Intelligence chief analyst Jasmine Enberg said, "If a quarter of Instagram users use Threads every month, it can be as big as Twitter." ”
It's worth noting that Threads' launch timing is also clever. After the Twitter platform experienced a "crash", its owner, Elon Musk, decided to limit the number of tweets that users can see per day and completely limit the viewing of tweets by unregistered users. The move sparked outrage among users, and many began migrating from Twitter to Threads.
Twitter also appears to have taken the hit from Threads. The Wall Street Journal bluntly said that Threads' hypergrowth seems to have taken an impact on Twitter.
CNN quoted a number of analysts as saying that the use of Twitter has dropped significantly in the past few days. Data from internet infrastructure company Cloudflare and web analytics firm Sametime show that Twitter traffic has been on a downward trend over the past few months, and the pace of decline appears to have accelerated in recent days. They believe this phenomenon may reflect a strong interest in Threads, which is migrating from Twitter to Threads on a large scale.
On July 9, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince shared a chart of Twitter's popularity, according to the data above, Twitter ranked 32nd on the list in January; From May to June, the software's ranking fluctuated between 35th and 37th; By early July, its popularity had plummeted, dropping to 40th place.
"Twitter's traffic plummeted." He commented.
SimilarWeb data shows that traffic to the Twitter site fell 5% in the first two days of Threads' full launch compared to the same period the previous week. According to SimilarWeb, Twitter traffic fell 11% year-over-year.
However, Threads is still in its infancy, and it is still unknown whether it can retain users and gain some prestige and popularity like Twitter in the past.
Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, stressed that Threads does not encourage "politics" and "hard news" because the additional censorship, negativity and integrity risks they pose are not worth "increasing engagement or revenue."
He said Threads' goal is not to replace Twitter, but to create a public discussion space for communities on Instagram that have never really embraced Twitter, and communities on Twitter (and other platforms) interested in less angry topics.
However, for now, the app still has certain limitations, such as users who need to delete their entire Instagram account if they want to log out of their account, and users cannot chat in private messages. Mosseri admits that the software is still missing a lot of features, including search, tags, chart synchronization, feeds, direct messages, etc., "We're working on it, and [the amazing team] is working hard, but full disclosure will take time." ”