Meta Platforms’s latest social app, Threads, appears to be losing active users quickly after having a wildly successful launch earlier this month. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said introducing a new consumer app is like a venture capitalist investing in a startup where “you try a bunch of things and a bunch of them don’t work and then, every once in a while, one hits and is a big success,” he told analysts on Meta’s second-quarter earnings call yesterday (July 26).
“In general, we haven’t had a lot of success with building standalone apps. We have a lot of work to do to really make Threads to reach its full potential,” Zuckerberg said on the call.
Threads, a direct competitor of Elon Musk’s Twitter, had a formidable start, attracting more than 100 million users within just a week of launch. But as the initial excitement fizzles out, most people who’d signed up stopped using the app. According to data from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower, the number of daily active users on Threads fell 50 percent one week after a July 7 peak and was down 70 percent two weeks after the peak.
Zuckerberg said the Threads team are currently working on user retention and “improving the basics” of the app because “the product was built by a relatively small team on a tight timeline.”
It’s unclear how much money Meta spent on developing Threads. But the app’s launch has sent its parent company’s shares to soar 9 percent, adding $44 billion to Meta’s market cap.
Zuckerberg suggested he’s in no rush to make Threads profitable. After the active user count stabilizes and the app’s functionalities complete, “we’ll focus on growing the community to the scale we think is going to be possible. Only after that will we focus on monetization,” he told analysts yesterday. “We’ve run this playbook many times before—with Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Stories, Reels and more—and this is as good of a start as we could have hoped for.”
Zuckerberg said he has hopes for Threads to eventually become the first ever text-based consumer app to reach one billion users. Currently it has only about 13 million, according to Sensor Tower estimates. Twitter’s daily active users remain steady at about 200 million, per Sensor Tower data.
Meta owns three of the five most popular social media apps in the world: Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. Facebook has roughly three billion monthly active users globally, and Instagram and WhatsApp each has about two billion.