Threads Emerges as a Major Challenge to Twitter After One Week

Threads, Meta’s alternative to Twitter, has undeniably experienced an exceptionally successful first week. It swiftly climbed to the highest position on app store rankings and achieved the title of the fastest-growing app in history. Surpassing the previous records set by chatGPT and TikTok, Threads amassed over 100 million users within a mere five days.

It’s even more impressive when you consider that the app is not available in the European Union, one of Meta’s most important markets. And while Threads clearly borrowed some moves from Meta’s growth hacking playbook, like sending out notifications to potential users on Instagram and pre-populating feeds with content and followers, Mark Zuckerberg called most of the early growth “organic.”

“It’s mostly organic demand and we haven’t even launched many campaigns yet,” he wrote in a celebratory post on Threads. Any way you spin it, it’s clearly bad news for Twitter.

While it’s too early to tell if Threads’ early success will translate into a long-term success, it has managed to completely dominate Twitter in its first week. All available metrics point to Threads not only being a viral hit in its own right, but doing so at the direct expense of Twitter.

Just days after Threads launched, Matthew Prince, CEO of DNS service Cloudflare, said Twitter traffic “tanked.” He shared a chart showing that visits to twitter.com had dropped sharply since late June, around the time Elon Musk began limiting the number of tweets users could see, and a few days later when Threads was launched.

Data from the analytics company SuchWeb point to the same pattern. According to the company, traffic on twitter.com dropped 5 percent in the two days following Threads’ launch compared to the same period the previous week. The company notes that this is in addition to the “general traffic decline” that preceded Threads.

There are other signs that Threads may be able to lure away existing Twitter users. According to a recent survey by Ipsos, 58% of American Twitter users said they are likely to try or have already tried Threads. 46% of US Twitter users said they are “likely to move or have already moved their Twitter activity to Threads.”

It should be noted that these are all very early gauges. An app’s early virality does not necessarily mean long-term success or continued growth. Google+ was once praised for its “meteoric” growth, reaching 100 million users less than a year after its launch more than a decade ago. More recently, social audio app Clubhouse was heralded as a sensation after growing to a few million users in its first few months. Both ended eventually.

And there are signs that Twitter has a core group of dedicated, blue-check-buying users. The same Ipsos poll found that more than half of American Twitter users were not interested in switching to Threads, at least not in the near future. Data recently released by app analytics firm Sensor Tower suggests that Twitter engagement remained stable in the days following the launch of Threads, while the average time spent on Threads has decreased.

Elon Musk and newly installed Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino seem eager to confirm this story. Both touted their own – somewhat dubious – metric after Threads launched, claiming the same week saw the platform’s “highest usage day since February”. “In terms of cumulative user seconds per day reported by iOS and Android, phone time is the hardest to game,” Musk wrote. (It’s unclear how he measured “cumulative user seconds” of usage time, since neither Apple nor Google reported usage metrics to app developers.)

Twitter management has more than enough reason to be upset about Threads’ overnight success. While a wave of Twitter alternatives has emerged since Musk’s chaotic Twitter takeover, none have topped 100 million. Mastodon, its most established competitor, reports 2 million monthly users. Bluesky, the much-hyped invitation service, has about 300,000 registrations.

More importantly, Threads has managed to capture a key demographic that many of its predecessors have not: brands. Threads has been a success for all brands. And as much as it’s made for the app’s furious, milky content, it’s very, very good for Metal. So far, brands are getting the kind of organic engagement most social media managers only dream of. As Website Plant recently pointed out in a report, big brands attract significantly more engagement on Threads compared to Twitter. This is true even for brands that have far more followers on Twitter than on Threads.

According to the report, 87 percent of brands received more likes on Threads posts than on Twitter. “The majority of posts we reviewed generated significantly more engagement on the new platform — regardless of whether the content itself was the same as on Twitter,” the company wrote.

Again, these are early statistics. It’s entirely possible that Threads users are engaging more with brands simply because their feed is fed, not because the Meta somehow made the content more appealing. But this kind of early engagement certainly makes brands more willing to commit Meta ad dollars whenever they do open advertising on the platform.

Zuckerberg has said the company won’t run ads on Threads until the app has a “clear path to a billion people.” But that doesn’t mean the threads will be ad-free for a long time. According to Axios, the company has already started working on branded content tools for the service and “will aim to make them available quickly”. So it should come as no surprise that Wall Street analysts are also excited about Threads’ prospects. The week-old platform could add up to $8 billion in revenue to Meta by 2025, according to an analyst estimate reported by Bloomberg.

All of this is particularly bleak for Musk and Twitter, whose financial outlook is so dire that the company has stopped paying numerous bills. According to a report by The New York Times last month, Twitter’s ad sales — its primary source of revenue — have plunged 59% from last year, and the performance is “unlikely to improve anytime soon.” And now Meta has swooped in, almost overnight, with a huge new platform poised to gobble up Twitter’s missing ad dollars and then some.

While this will likely bring some satisfaction to Musk and Twitter’s biggest critics, it’s worth noting that it has significant implications for the online ecosystem, where yet another Meta-owned platform dominates its closest competitors. Metalla and Instagram in particular have very different norms and standards regarding what kind of speech is acceptable on its service. And there are still more questions than answers about Meta’s plans to integrate Threads into the wider Fediverse.

But it’s impossible to ignore how much momentum Threads has gained in its first week, and how much of it has come at the direct expense of Twitter.