Threads’ daily active user base has reportedly declined by 70%

The number of daily active users on Meta Platforms Inc.’s Threads app has reportedly dropped by 70% in just 10 days.

The Wall Street Journal reported the decline today, citing data from market intelligence company Sensor Tower Inc. The company estimates that Threads had 13 million active daily users this past Monday. According to Sensor Tower, that represents a 70% decrease from ten days earlier, when the app reached a peak of more than 40 million daily active users.

Sensor Tower also evaluated app engagement as part of its research. According to the company, the average amount of time that Threads users spend in the app plummeted from 19 minutes to four. SimilarWeb Ltd., which provides an analytics platform of the same name, shared similar findings. 

Threads launched on July 5 and experienced a surge of signups over the next few days. The app’s installed base reached 30 million users within 18 hours and passed the 70 million user mark about a day later. On July 10, 10 days after launch, Meta Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg announced that the app had processed 100 million signups.

In an update published on Threads this week, Zuckerberg wrote that “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.”

Meta’s plan to improve user retention and other core metrics places an emphasis on extending Threads’ feature set.

Threads features a Twitter-like interface and close integration with Instagram. Users can include up to 500 characters in their posts along with images and videos. When a user follows other accounts, content from those accounts becomes available in a centralized feed.

Meta attempted to release a significant update to the iOS version of Threads earlier this week. The update included an automatic text transaction feature, usability improvements and several bug fixes. Meta began rolling out the enhancements on Tuesday, but had to stop the process shortly thereafter because of an unexpected technical issue.

The company is also planning other upgrades. On Thursday, it detailed that Threads users will receive the ability to create multiple accounts and edit posts. Also in the works: a content feed that displays posts from other accounts chronologically.

Meta’s longer-term development roadmap for Threads centers on an open-source technology called ActivityPub. The technology will enable users to access posts from other ActivityPub-compatible social networks directly in the Threads interface. Furthermore, it promises to ease the task of moving content between platforms.

“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,” Instagram Adam Mosseri, who is also responsible for Threads, wrote in a post on the latter app. 

Image: Meta