The number of daily Threads users is in free-fall

The early strength of X competitor Threads has disappeared. If you were the kind of person to throw out puns, you might say that the Instagram-based social media platform was (ahem) getting to be threadbare. Luckily, this writer would never subject you to this kind of corny writing style (ahem, again). Let's get to some actual data thanks to CNN. The latter cites information from app research firm Sensor Tower which shows that Threads' daily active users count has plummeted 82% from its launch day through the end of July. Ouch.

That figure indicates that just 8 million users are visiting Threads every day. You might recall that Threads burst onto the scene by notching 100 million accounts during its first five days in business. The platform, linked to Instagram and owned by Meta, was created to give people an alternative to what was then called Twitter after many Twitter users were unhappy with changes that owner Elon Musk was bringing to the site.

The day after the release of the Threads app, the latter had a peak number of 44 million active users visiting the social media platform and it has been downhill since. Sensor Tower also pointed out that people are opening the app less and when they do open the app, subscribers are spending less time using it. 

On the day Threads went live, users opened the app 14 times on average and spent 19 minutes during each session rummaging through the site's content. By August 1st, the average user opened the app only 2.6 times (again, on average) and each time these subscribers spent only 2.9 minutes browsing through Threads. Those figures come from Sensor Tower but another market research firm, Similarweb, reported similar findings.

Similarweb's data reveals that a peak 49 million users visited Threads on July 7th, the day following the platform's launch. David Carr, a senior insights manager at Similarweb, said that by July 29th that figure had dropped to 11 million which was a 78% decline from the peak number. Sensor Tower says that the average user count for Threads continues to decline at the rate of 1% daily. Despite the falloff, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said last month that he was "quite optimistic" about Threads.

Zuckerberg, who co-founded Facebook which changed its corporate name to Meta back in 2021, also stated that "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."

When Threads launched early last month, it did so without many of the features that you find on X. But late last month the platform did disseminate an update and while it still doesn't offer several key Twitter features, Threads hopes to narrow the gap soon including the launch of a Threads website.