Even if Twitter Tanks, Threads Is a Long Way From a Social Media Success
Meta’s would-be Twitter killer Threads will not fare much better than Meta’s past attempts at branching out into smartphones and video conferencing, according to Insider Intelligence.
The app that Meta launched in July as an Instagram spinoff has already seen steep declines in traffic, and Insider sees no signs of a turnaround coming. A report it released Tuesday predicts that Threads will finish 2023 with 23.7 million US users, below half the 56.1 million it predicts for Twitter/X and just 17.5% of the 135.2 million people on Instagram.
That total for Threads would put it in second-to-last place among major social platforms, ahead of only Tumblr (20.4 million). In comparison, Facebook will remain the most popular social network, with 177.9 million US users, followed by Instagram and then TikTok (102.3 million).
Insider expects Threads’ cellar-dwelling rank to persist into 2025 even as its user base rises to 33.9 million, or 23.3% of Instagram’s total.
“The path to 1 billion Threads users is longer than Meta would like,” Jasmine Enberg, principal analyst at Insider, says in the report. “The link to Instagram can only take Threads so far, and the clock is ticking for the network effect to take hold.”
Insider also hears a clock ticking, or perhaps a bell tolling, for Twitter. In line with the New York market-research firm’s earlier forecast that Twitter users will continue to head for the exits, the report predicts that the Elon Musk-owned social network will shrink to 47 million users by 2025. That would represent a roughly 20% drop from the service’s 2022 total of 58.9 million, a rate of decline we’re more used to seeing in cable-TV subscriber stats.
The report doesn’t mention two other Twitter alternatives, Mastodon
Read more on pcmag.com
