Threads Craze Fading? Possible Reasons Behind Its Decline

Instagram’s highly anticipated launch of Threads garnered over 100 million sign-ups within a week. However, the initial excitement surrounding this supposed Twitter competitor appears to be waning. While Threads aims to capitalize on Twitter’s increasing shortcomings, Instagram still has a considerable amount of work to do before Threads can truly rival the popular micro-blogging platform.

Various data reports claim that Threads had around 49 million daily active users when it launched on July 7, which has now halved to 23 million DAUs at the end of the second week of July. Data analytics companies like SensorTower have also seen a huge drop in users not logging into Threads after a week of use.

New apps always generate a lot of interest, which Threads did, and Instagram played a big role in pushing an app that uses your existing account credentials to work, which meant you didn’t need a new account to sign up for Threads. Mastodon is another social media platform that looked to build its case after the recent controversy surrounding Twitter.

However, the similarity between Threads and Twitter ends when you create a post, repost it (retweet) and like the content. Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri said Threads doesn’t promote news content, which means you’re mostly stuck on a platform with people in your circle, and everyone else is followed out of thin air. You don’t want your family members to read the messages in the message thread.

Twitter has built its ecosystem around real-time news. For example, when your city is stuck in an earthquake, Twitter is the place for millions, not Instagram.

And if that wasn’t enough, people have been using Twitter to act anonymously, which is not possible on Threads because of its direct links to Instagram. Twitter has claimed that a large percentage of its users are anonymous, and Threads clearly misses out on that number of daily active users.

Does that mean Threads is doomed to fail just a few weeks after its release? Not really, but Instagram and Mosser need to consider a new approach to bring users back to the platform if they want to use the app for business reasons in the near future.