Threads Surpasses 100M Users, As Twitter Traffic Tanks

Since the introduction of Meta’s text-based platform Threads, which has already crossed 100 million sign-ups since its debut last week, user activity on Twitter has continued to decline.

Threads launched in the United States on Wednesday and is being lauded by Meta officials like Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri, as a more encouraging “public square” for communities “that never really embraced Twitter.” User acceptance appears to be high so far.

Over the weekend, Threads hit 100 million signed up. That is primarily a result of organic demand, while promotions haven’t started yet. “Can’t believe it’s only been 5 days” says  Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, in a post on Monday.

Twitter seems to have been impacted. On Sunday, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince tweeted indicating that the platform’s traffic was “tanking.”

Web traffic to Twitter was down 5% during the first two full days that Threads was largely accessible compared to the previous week, according to Similarweb, a data provider that specializes in web analytics. Twitter’s website traffic, according to the company, is down 11% compared to the same days in 2022.

The fact that Threads is linked to an already-existing social network, Meta’s Instagram, contributes to its rapid growth. As more people download the app, users can sign up using their existing Instagram usernames and keep some of their following.

It is worthy of note that Threads’ growth has been extremely rapid as it has reached the 100 million mark in a few days after its launch. This is even quicker when you compare its growth with OpenAI’s generative chatbot ChatGPT, which achieved the 100 million mark after two months.

Since the app is yet to be launched in Europe, where Mosseri claimed there are still some regulatory issues to resolve, there is still a ton of possibility for growth. If Threads is able to sustain its user base, establishing itself as a serious rival to Twitter may just be easier than we thought. Twitter in its most recent quarterly earnings report as a publicly traded company last summer recorded almost 238 million monetizable daily active users.

Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, seems to have expressed some concern over Threads in a letter to Meta, through his longtime legal representative Alex Spiro accusing Meta of “unlawful misappropriation” of trade secrets.

Over the weekend, Musk and Zuckerberg engaged in a verbal exchange in which Zuckerberg ridiculed Musk’s tweeting technique and Musk responded by calling Zuckerberg an unpleasant name.