Zuck’s Ghost Town: Twitter Clone Threads Suffers 82% Engagement Drop

Facebook’s “sanely run” Twitter rival, Threads, has experienced a staggering decline in user engagement, with daily active user count down 82 percent from launch as of July 31. The app, which once boasted an impressive 44 million daily active users, has seen those numbers plummet to just eight million in an astonishingly short amount of time.

CNN reports that as of July 31, the number of daily active users on Facebook’s new social network Threads was down 82 percent from when it first launched. The app’s user base has decreased from an impressive 44 million daily active users to just eight million.

Data from market research companies Similarweb and Sensor Tower highlight the difficulties Facebook (now known as Meta) faces as it attempts to take advantage of the opportunity brought on by the shakeup surrounding Twitter’s management. Threads’ daily active user count is now the lowest it has been since the day after the app’s release.

On its launch day, Threads users opened the app an average of 14 times and spent an average of 19 minutes scrolling through it. However, these figures have fallen sharply. According to Abe Yousef, a senior insights analyst at Sensor Tower, as of August 1, people were only using Threads for an average of 2.9 minutes per day and 2.6 sessions per day.

The decline in user engagement has been consistent since the app’s launch. Findings from Similarweb showed the same pattern of decline, with Threads’ user count peaking at roughly 49 million on July 7 and falling steadily to just over 11 million by July 29.

Despite the concerning numbers, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg remains optimistic about the app’s future. Speaking on the company’s earnings call last month, he said, “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.”

Threads was launched with only a handful of features, and later promised to add in highly requested tools like a reverse-chronological content feed, a desktop version of the app, and direct messages. On July 10, Zuckerberg announced that more than 100 million people had signed up for Threads, making it one of the fastest-growing apps in history.

The company is now reportedly looking into adding “retention-driving hooks” that can keep users engaged, as the steepest drop-off occurred in the two weeks immediately following Threads’ launch. The new data shows how the decline has continued and is ongoing, with Threads’ daily active user count still falling at a rate of roughly one percent per day.

Read more at CNN here.

Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan