Meta’s new text-based social app Threads has quickly gained 100 million users since launching last week, which appears to be negatively impacting traffic on Twitter. According to web analytics, Twitter traffic declined 5-11% over the first two days Threads was available compared to the previous week. Threads was able to grow rapidly by allowing users to sign up with their existing Instagram accounts and bring over some of their followers. However, Threads has not yet launched in Europe due to regulatory issues. The fast growth of Threads may solidify its position as a real competitor to Twitter, which has over 238 million daily active users.
I don’t think anybody’s saying there’s anything wrong with using Instagram accounts as the base to access the platform. It’ll become federated soon, so that won’t be a requirement for long.
The issue that some people take, myself included, is that those aren’t really “new” users, so calling it “growth” is disingenuous. They’re already Instagram users. It effectively makes Threads just Instagram+. Not that that’s inherently a bad thing, but it’s not really “organic growth” as Zuck is calling it. There’s nothing to “grow” if the user base already existed in the first place; it’s just the same user base having access to a new feature.
I can see where you’re coming from, but the “growth” they’re tracking doesn’t seem to be the number of Instagram accounts, but the number of accounts that have signed up for Threads. From a business perspective, they’re still growing a new service. Even if these are still the same people who are already using Instagram, they’re increasing their engagement with Instagram’s services and spending more time there. Now those people are using their Instagram account for photo sharing and microblogging instead of switching to Twitter for that, and more engagement means more ad interaction.