Engadget - The Threads honeymoon may be over

It's Tuesday, July 18, 2023.

How many times have you posted to Threads this week? After becoming the fastest-growing social network of all time, new data from analytics firm SimilarWeb suggests engagement on Threads has substantially declined from initial highs.

Threads saw daily active users decline from 49 million on July 7th to 23.6 million on July 14th, SimilarWeb writes in a new report. That’s still… millions, of course. And in the United States, which reportedly saw the highest engagement, use plummeted from 21 minutes per day to just over six minutes in the same period. To couch these estimates, SimilarWeb’s analysis is based only on Android app use, but it tallies with other companies’ findings – and anecdotally, I’ve seen my close friends and Threads favorites post a lot less.

In a Threads post on Friday, Instagram’s top exec, Adam Mosseri, suggested the company wasn’t particularly focused on engagement metrics at this stage. (Of course he’d say that.)

He wrote, “Our focus right now is not engagement, which has been amazing, but getting past the initial peak and trough we see with every new product and building new features, dialing in performance and improving ranking.”

– Mat Smith

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