Threads has reportedly suffered a significant usership falloff after scoring a substantial number of early adopters. Photo Credit: Julio Lopez
After attracting a massive number of users out of the gate, Meta’s Threads has reportedly experienced a material community-size falloff. Meanwhile, more than a few commercially prominent artists have thus far decided against using the Twitter alternative.
One month back, Digital Music News reported that Instagram-connected Threads had surpassed approximately 100 million users during its first week. Amid criticism of the app’s perceived lack of features, however, both usership and engagement fell significantly throughout the remainder of July, according to reports.
And as of last month’s conclusion, Threads had a comparatively small eight million daily active users, per Business Insider, which cited Sensor Tower data. Meta execs have signaled that more features are forthcoming, but it remains to be seen whether the potential Threads additions will stem the tide of fleeing users.
(“It was definitely a rush job,” one less-than-thrilled early adopter of Threads wrote in a Play Store review. “It’s been weeks, and the only requested feature they’ve managed to push out is the following feed. Every other ‘standard’ feature is MIA. The algorithms are also a mess – you have to put way too much work into finding new people or threads.”)
Of course, with just 24 hours in a day, logic suggests that even social-media diehards may in the long term find it difficult to allocate time to Threads, Instagram proper, Facebook, Twitter/X, TikTok, and different platforms alike.
Participation from high-profile creators is another key component of bringing users to Threads. At least on the music side, though, adoption has been slow, with Music Ally indicating that only six of the top-20 musicians on Instagram (by follower count) have ported their profiles to Threads.
Moreover, certain of these six persons aren’t particularly active on Threads; at the time of this writing, Jennifer Lopez’s latter Threads message had been published five days ago, compared to six days for Shakira’s latest message, for instance. Others, like Katy Perry, had post-free profiles on the platform, which Apple has supported with “rich link” iMessage previews.
Besides the alleged lack of core features behind Threads at present, the Meta-owned service is competing for accounts and interest as Twitter continues to build out its revenue-sharing program. Adjacent to their competition in the social-media world, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk have publicly disclosed (seemingly serious) plans to settle their well-documented differences inside the cage.
About two weeks back, Spotify and Instagram partnered to create “Reels Charts” in select markets, and subsequent reports noted that the TikTok competitor Instagram Reels was racking up a decidedly healthy 200 billion views per day.
