The Rapid Rise of Threads Appears to Be Hurting Twitter
Third-party estimates suggest people have been switching to Meta’s new microblogging service from Elon Musk’s Twitter Meta Platforms launched Threads, which looks and functions similarly to Twitter, less than a week ago. Photo: Cristobal Herrera-Ulashkevich/Zuma Press By Sarah E. Needleman Updated July 10, 2023 5:21 pm ET The ultrafast growth of Threads looks like it is already taking a toll on Twitter. Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Threads parent Meta Platforms, said the new microblogging platform hit 100 million sign-ups less than a week after launching. At least two third-party estimates suggest Twitter traffic has been falling in tandem, an indication that its users may be leaving it for Threads rather than attempting to juggle both.
Meta Platforms launched Threads, which looks and functions similarly to Twitter, less than a week ago.
Photo: Cristobal Herrera-Ulashkevich/Zuma Press
The ultrafast growth of Threads looks like it is already taking a toll on Twitter.
Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Threads parent Meta Platforms, said the new microblogging platform hit 100 million sign-ups less than a week after launching. At least two third-party estimates suggest Twitter traffic has been falling in tandem, an indication that its users may be leaving it for Threads rather than attempting to juggle both.
Twitter said it had roughly 535 million monetizable monthly active users in June, The Wall Street Journal reported last week.
The two products look and function in similar ways. Both focus on sharing short snippets of text but also allow users to post photos and videos. One distinction is that joining Threads requires having an account with Meta’s Instagram, which has more than 2 billion monthly users. That has made signing up easy and fast, though deleting a Threads account means also having to delete one’s Instagram account.
In the first two days that Threads was fully available, traffic to Twitter’s website was down 5% compared with the same two days of the previous week, according to SimilarWeb, which tracks online activity. Year over year, such traffic was down 11%, the firm said.
On Sunday Matthew Prince, CEO of cloud-infrastructure company Cloudflare, tweeted “Twitter traffic tanking” alongside a chart showing a decline in Twitter’s web domain ranking relative to other top internet destinations. A spokeswoman for Cloudflare said it ranks domains according to the volume of requests for access.
In a post on Threads, Zuckerberg said the 100 million sign-ups are from “mostly organic demand and we haven’t even turned on many promotions yet.”
Twitter owner Elon Musk and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg have agreed to a cage match. A physical fight might be a first but WSJ’s Joanna Stern breaks down—with the help of action figures—why this tech brawl is actually like past Silicon Valley beefs. Photo Illustration: Kenny Wassus, Preston Jessee
Broader markets rose on Monday, but many of the largest tech companies were a weak spot—except for Meta.
Microsoft, Apple, Amazon.com and Alphabet
were all down. Meta shares gained more than 1%.“Don’t want to leave you hanging by a thread… but Twitter, you really outdid yourselves! Last week we had our largest usage day since February,” said Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino in a tweet Monday afternoon. “There’s only ONE Twitter. You know it. I know it.”
A Meta spokeswoman referred to Zuckerberg’s post. A Twitter spokesman referred to Yaccarino’s tweet.
The arrival of Threads has added more fuel to a long rivalry between Zuckerberg and Twitter owner Elon Musk,
which went into overdrive last month when the men tentatively agreed to a cage match.Days after Threads made its debut, Musk accused Zuckerberg’s Meta of using Twitter’s trade secrets and poaching its employees to work on Threads. A Meta spokesman said no one on the Threads engineering team was a former Twitter employee.
Twitter has undergone a string of changes since Elon Musk bought the company in October and took it private in an effort to increase subscription revenue and cut costs. Those changes have created an opening for rivals to swoop in.
The company began charging users for identity verification with blue checks that were previously free and awarded only to accounts that Twitter deemed authentic and notable. More recently, Musk put limits on how many tweets users could see without prior notice. He said verified accounts—those paying a monthly subscription—would be able to see more tweets than unverified users.
Twitter has also suffered several technical problems since Musk took over and advertisers have pulled back amid concerns about content moderation.
Meta, too, has suffered setbacks of its own. Facebook mishandled millions of its users’ data in the Cambridge Analytica scandal and was slow to respond to 2016 election meddling. The Journal’s Facebook Files investigation found that Meta’s platforms were riddled with flaws that caused harm, including being toxic for some teenage girls.
Threads’ sharp growth over the past several days suggests Meta’s users are willing to give the new platform a chance.
Joining Threads requires having an account with Meta’s Instagram, which has more than 2 billion monthly users.
Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
“Whether they actually become engaged users or not, it will take a while to know,” said Evercore ISI analyst Mark Mahaney.
From advertisers’ perspective, Threads could gain an advantage over Twitter given Meta’s strength in this area, Mahaney added.
“Threads is owned by a company that’s very good at helping marketers effectively target and run campaigns against relevant customers,” he said. “They can do it better than Twitter can.”
Since Twitter’s launch in 2006, it has fended off startup rivals such as Parler, a social network popularized by supporters of former President Donald Trump, and overcome hiccups, which suggests the company can weather this latest storm, said Cascend analyst Eric Ross.
“Twitter has been around for a very long time and has survived a lot of different versions of problems,” he said. “I don’t think Twitter is going away.”
Write to Sarah E. Needleman at [email protected]
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