Facebook-created Twitter rival Threads lost half of its users a month after launch

Massively adopted at its launch at the beginning of the month, with more than 100 million subscribers in a few days, Threads - the new social network of Meta (Facebook, Instagram) - has already come down from its cloud at the end of July. “Obviously, when you have 100 million people signing up all at once, it would be ideal to keep them, or even keep more than half of them. But there, it is not yet the case”, thus expressed Mark Zuckerberg this week, within the framework of a meeting organized Thursday on this subject. In other words, a large part of the new users of the application, who have registered in droves, have not yet become regular visitors.

Far from being dismantled, the big boss of Meta still felt that this leak of these users was completely “normal” in his eyes, as confirmed by an article from BBC News. Above all, he hopes that the loyalty of new subscribers will be confirmed as new features are implemented on the application. And this, while today, some are wondering about the added value of Threads, especially when the social network is compared to its great rival Twitter, renamed X.

This is precisely what the Meta teams are working on, which are working to add more features to encourage users to come back to the application. Among them are those that people who are already on Instagram “can see Threads as something important”, as Chris Cox, the chief product officer of the Meta group, wishes. Work “on the right track” according to Mark Zuckerberg.

In the meantime, billionaire and Twitter boss Elon Musk welcomes the good results of his platform renamed X, bought with great fanfare at the end of 2022. “Monthly users have reached a new peak”, he launched on his Twitter account on Friday, sharing a graph that showed a latest tally at over 540 million. In May 2022, more than a year ago, Twitter had 229 million monthly active users, according to a statement made before the takeover.

Figures from which Mark Zuckerberg is still far, despite the lightning start of his new social network. Unlike Twitter, Threads is not available to residents of the European Union. Meta has chosen not to make available to European Internet users, the time to clarify the consequences of the new regulation of digital markets (DMA), which came into force at the beginning of May. The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) also found in early July that Meta had harmed the interests and rights of users of its services by collecting, without authorization, personal data for the purpose of targeted advertising.

But these disappointments are not enough to stop Mark Zuckerberg, who has also never hidden the great ambitions he had for his new service. Wishing even that it does much better than Twitter. The CEO had already communicated widely that he wanted Threads to surpass one billion users one day. A goal never achieved, so far, by the social network of Elon Musk.