Meta’s new app Threads may not yet be the “Twitter killer” that some social media denizens claim, but industry analysts say its launch last week is seriously hurting Twitter’s numbers.
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, said on Monday that Threads has already hit 100 million downloads.
Meanwhile, traffic to Twitter is “tanking,” according to Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince, who Tweeted a chart of Twitter’s domain ranking dropping over the weekend.
Twitter traffic tanking. https://t.co/KSIXqNsu40 pic.twitter.com/mLlbuXVR6r
— Matthew Prince ? (@eastdakota) July 9, 2023
According to Similar Web, a website analysis and market intelligence platform, traffic to Twitter’s website dropped 5% during the first few days of Threads’ rollout.
The gloves are off
Threads’ surprising early success has caused a contentious relationship between Twitter’s Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta to unravel completely.
Last week, Twitter’s CEO threatened to sue Meta, claiming that the new platform copied Twitter.
“Twitter intends to strictly enforce its intellectual property rights, and demands that Meta take immediate steps to stop using any Twitter trade secrets or other highly confidential information,” Twitter lawyer Alex Spiro wrote.
Over the weekend, Musk aimed his ire straight at Zuckerberg, tweeting, “Zuck is a cuck,” and proposing “a literal dick measuring contest.”
I propose a literal dick measuring contest ?
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 10, 2023
So far, Zuckerberg hasn’t taken the bait, preferring to point to Threads’ impressive numbers than to spar with Musk — although he did agree to a cage match last week.
In a Threads post, Zuck boasted that Threads signups were the result of “mostly organic demand, and we haven’t even turned on many promotions yet.”
But despite the colorful barbs and taunts between billionaires, the jury is still out on the real impact Threads will have on Twitter’s bottom line.
Sure, 100 million users in 4 days is an astonishing achievement, but it’s still far from Twitter’s 354 million active users. And just because everyone’s checking out the shiny new car on the lot doesn’t mean they’ll stick around after the test drive.
“Whether they actually become engaged users or not, it will take a while to know,” said Evercore ISI analyst Mark Mahaney told The Wall Street Journal.
Jonathan Small
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