Photo credit: Bastian Riccardi
Threads has racked up more than 150 million downloads in just one week, reaching one-fifth of Twitter’s weekly active user base.
The app was an overnight success for mother Meta, who saw an opportunity in the wake of the new Twitter glitch caused by Musk. This app insights provided by data.ai discover that threads gained massive traction early on, despite not having core features like hashtags at launch.
While growth has been tremendous for Threads, it seems like curiosity is waning. App analytics company Sensor Tower reports that Thread’s daily active users have dropped by about 20% since its inception. The time spent on the app has also dropped by 50% from 20 minutes to just 10 minutes. Despite the decline, curiosity about a potential Twitter alternative highlights just how unstable the Twitter platform has become for anyone engaged in brand advertising.
Perhaps surprisingly, the leading country interested in threads isn’t the United States, but India — where TikTok has been banned. India accounted for 33% of the 150 million total downloads in the first week. Next is Brazil (22%), followed by the United States (16%), Mexico (8%) and Japan (5%). Are you curious that there are no European countries on this list? That’s because Threads isn’t available in the EU due to privacy regulations – and Meta is actively keeping Europeans out with VPNs.
European users complained that they couldn’t access the Threads app via VPN, and Meta confirmed that this was intentional. “Threads is currently unavailable in most countries in Europe and we have taken additional measures to prevent residents of those countries from currently accessing it,” the company said in a press release. “Europe continues to be an incredibly important market for Meta and we hope to make Threads available here in the future.”
Because the Threads app has extensive data tracking that includes a range of personally identifiable information (health, finance, location, browsing history, contacts, and search history), it cannot be legally released in the EU. The Digital Markets Act gateway lays out how tech giants like Meta can combine this collected information for advertising purposes.