Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s new Twitter competitor, Threads, has seen a drop in half of all site traffic only two weeks after its launch, according to The Messenger.
Meta’s new Twitter-like platform Threads has seen a 25.4 million drop in active users, with traffic falling from 49 million active users to 23.6 million active users in just a week, according to The Messenger. Threads originally saw 100 million new users in its first five days, with 30 million of those coming in just the first day. (RELATED: Media Outlets Flock To Promote Zuckerberg’s New Rival To Musk’s Twitter)
“I’m very optimistic about how the Threads community is coming together,” Zuckerberg said Monday night on Threads. “Early growth was off the charts, but more importantly 10s of millions of people now come back daily. That’s way ahead of what we expected. The focus for the rest of the year is improving the basics and retention. It’ll take time to stabilize, but once we nail that then we’ll focus on growing the community. We’ve run this playbook many times (FB, IG, Stories, Reels, etc) and I’m confident Threads is on a good path too.”
Threads is a new app from Meta launched in early July that takes a similar style and functionality to Twitter, according to Axios. The platform is linked to Instagram, enabling users to create an account from their Instagram account.
NEW – Daily active users on #Zuckerberg‘s #Twitter clone “#Threads” dropped from 49 million to 23.6 million in a week. pic.twitter.com/v2Qd3cUTUU
— CBKNEWS (@CBKNEWS121) July 18, 2023
The new app from Meta has faced criticism for censorship since its recent arrival. Libs of TikTok posted to the site saying “[n]on-binary isn’t real” just two days after the site’s launch, with the post being removed due to “hate speech” guidelines. Other Meta-owned platforms Facebook and Instagram have faced similar censorship efforts in the past.
“We’re on day eight of Threads, and growth, retention, and engagement are all way ahead of where I expected us to be at this point. But what I’m most excited about is the quality of the creator community that has shown up,” Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, said on Threads. “Our focus right now is not engagement, which has been amazing, but getting past the initial peak and trough we see with every new product, and building new features, dialing in performance, and improving ranking.”
Just hours after Threads launched, Twitter lawyer Alex Spiro threatened in a letter to sue the company over “intellectual property rights,” claiming that Meta hired a number of ex-Twitter employees to create Threads as a copy of Twitter using Twitter’s confidential information.
When asked for comment, Meta directed the Daily Caller News Foundation to Zuckerberg and Mosseri’s Thread posts.
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