Threads Lose Most Of 100 Million Users, Mark Zuckerberg: That's Normal!

JAKARTA - In just five days in the first week of its launch, Threads managed to pocket 100 million users. However, now that number has dropped dramatically.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg admits that he has lost some of the total users he has reached at this time. The text-based social media was launched as an answer to challenging X, a rebranding of Twitter.

"Obviously, if you have over 100 million people signed up, ideally it would be great if they all or even half of them stayed. We're not there yet," Zuckerberg told employees recently.

That data is also corroborated by a third party, web analytics firm SimilarWeb which suggests Threads may have lost more than half of its active users.

Daily active users for Threads on Android fell from 49 million on July 7 to 23.6 million on July 14, and then to 12.6 million on July 23.

"We don't have daily figures for iOS yet, but we suspect a similar boom-and-bust pattern. Threads are taking off like a rocket, with their close association with Instagram as a driver," SimilarWeb said in its report.

"However, Threads developers need to fill in missing features and add some new and unique features if they want to make checking apps a daily habit for users," he added.

Even so, Zuckerberg considers the situation very normal and anticipates retention to improve the new features added to the app.

"Threads has been dramatically more than we expected in terms of adoption and that rate, we had a small team working on it for a while, but it really blew up and created a huge opportunity right away," Zuckerberg said.

After its launch, Threads received a lot of criticism for its limited functionality. Since then, Meta has added new features, such as separate Following and For You feeds.

Ability to translate posts into different languages, brings desktop version and search functionality.

Meta CPO Chris Cox also told employees they should now focus on adding more retention-driving hooks to attract people back to the platform.

As Cox gives an example, it's important to make sure people on the Instagram app can see Threads.

The two platforms are closely related, where to sign up for Threads, users must have an Instagram account. This was quoted by Reuters, Ars Technicia and BBC International, Monday, 31 July.