Threads struggles to maintain active users as daily user count on ‘Twitter killer’ app drops by as much as 81% and only 8 million people log in daily

The success of Mark Zuckerberg’s Twitter rival could be hanging by a thread.

Daily users of Threads, the ‘Twitter killer’ app launched by Meta, have tanked since its record-breaking July 5 launch — from a peak of 44 million to just eight million.

The time people spend on the app has also fallen sharply, according to an analysis by Sensor Tower and Relatedweb.

The app initially attracted 100 million users in its first five days – the fastest growth of any app in history. Users opened the app 14 times a day after the initial launch and spent an average of 19 minutes on it.

Today, the average time users spend on Threads has dropped to 2.9 minutes per day and they only open them between two and three times.

Daily users of the Threads app have dropped from 44 million at launch to about eight million now. Mark Zuckerberg launched it as a rival to Twitter, which gets 100 million daily users

Twitter, which was bought by Elon Musk for $44 billion last year, has threatened to sue Meta over the launch of Threads. Musk and Zuckerberg are bitter rivals and plan to physically fight to reconcile their differences

The latest figures continue a downward trend in app usage and will be a concern for Zuckerberg, the ninth richest person in the world with a fortune of $114 billion, who hoped to capitalize on the ongoing turmoil on Twitter.

Twitter — which has more than 100 million daily active users — is currently being rebranded X by billionaire rival Elon Musk, the world’s richest man with a net worth of $236.1 billion, according to Forbes.

Twitter threatened to sue Meta over claims it hired former Musk employees who “have and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly confidential information.”

The rivalry between the billionaires is now so deep that they even plan to physically fight to settle their differences.

Zuckerberg, 39, spoke about the drop in Threads users in mid-July, when separate figures showed it had failed to maintain its initial popularity. He said he remained “optimistic” about Threads’ future and that the numbers were still “well ahead of what we expected.”

“The focus for the rest of the year is on improving base and retention,” Zuckerberg said in a message to Threads.

In a Threads post in mid-July, Zuckerberg acknowledged declining user numbers since Threads’ record-breaking launch and said the focus for the remainder of 2023 was “improving retention.”

The latest figures continue a downward trend in app usage and will worry Zuckerberg, the ninth richest person in the world with a fortune of $114 billion, who hoped to capitalize on the ongoing turmoil on Twitter

“It will take time to stabilize, but once we get the hang of that, we will focus on growing the community. We’ve run this playbook many times (FB, IG, Stories, Reels, etc.) and I’m confident Threads is on the right track as well.”

Daily users are an important metric for social media platforms to secure advertisers.

Twitter has lost about 50 percent of its ad revenue since Musk, 52, bought the company in October 2022 for $44 billion. X Corp., the parent company, recently filed a lawsuit against the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a nonprofit, alleging that it has “initiated a scare campaign to drive advertisers off the platform.”

In the first two full days of Threads’ availability, traffic to twitter.com was five percent lower than on the same days the week before, an analysis found.

Traffic eventually recovered, but was about 11 percent lower than last year during a week-long analysis in mid-July.