Threads User Engagement Drops to 4 Minutes From 19 Minutes

Threads’ user engagement reportedly continued to decline in the second week since its launch.

The average time iOS and Android users spend on the Meta-owned social media app has decreased to four minutes from 19 minutes shortly after launch, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported Friday (July 21), citing data from digital data and analytics company Similarweb.

The number of daily active users has dropped 70% from its peak, to 13 million, the report added, citing estimates from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower.

Threads competitor Twitter has 200 million daily active users who spend an average of 30 minutes a day on that social media app, Sensor Tower said, per the report.

In a post on Threads, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said: “I’m very optimistic about how the Threads community is coming together. Early growth was off the charts, but more importantly 10s of millions of people now come back daily. That’s way ahead of what we expected. The focus for the rest of the year is improving the basics and retention. It’ll take time to stabilize, but once we nail that then we’ll focus on growing the community. We’ve run this playbook many times (FB [Facebook], IG [Instagram], Stories, Reels, etc) and I’m confident Threads is on a good path too.”

The WSJ report attributed the drop-off in user engagement to accounts posting more frequently on Twitter than they do on Threads, to company brands being the most prevalent accounts on Threads, and to a lack of features like the option to have a chronological feed and the ability to edit posts.

Prof. Richard Hanna of Babson College told the WSJ: “It’s clear by the drop-off that people are seeing they can’t do as much, and there are certain things that they want to be able to do that perhaps they can do on other apps.”

Threads experienced a surge in sign-ups in the days following its launch, with Zuckerberg reporting July 10 that the app passed the 100-million user mark five days after launching.

By the time the app was a week old, however, it had begun experiencing a drop-off in growth and engagement.