By The rivalry between billionaire social media owners Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk shows no signs of cooling down. Zuckerberg’s Meta Platforms recently launched the microblogging site Threads, which has gained impressive traction in a short period of time. This success seems to be frustrating Musk, the owner of Twitter.
According to data-tracking website Quiver Quantitative, Threads has already garnered over 100 million users as of early Monday. An updated report from analytics firm Similarweb reveals that in the first two days since Threads’ release, web traffic to twitter.com decreased by 5% compared to the previous week. Compared to a year ago, Twitter traffic was down by 11% during those two days. It’s worth noting that this decline occurred even without the presence of Threads.
Similarweb’s report further states that Twitter traffic experienced a 4% drop in June compared to the same time last year. Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince confirmed this downward trend, describing Twitter traffic as “tanking” in a tweet on Sunday.
In addition to declining traffic, Similarweb highlighted a drop in Twitter user retention, which it considers “a bad sign for app user loyalty.” The percentage of new Android users who continue using the Twitter app regularly after 30 days decreased from 19% in May 2022 to 16% in May 2023. On the other hand, new Instagram users have maintained a steady loyalty rate of approximately 40%.
Similarweb plans to closely monitor engagement moving forward, particularly because Threads lacks features like hashtags that have contributed to Twitter’s popularity.
Zuckerberg himself acknowledged the rapid user growth in a recent post on Threads, stating, “Threads reached 100 million sign-ups over the weekend. That’s primarily due to organic demand, and we haven’t even activated many promotions yet. It’s hard to believe it’s only been 5 days!”
The rivalry between Zuckerberg and Musk continues to intensify. Musk, who previously proposed a cage match with Zuckerberg, took to Twitter on Sunday to hurl insults and challenge him to a certain body part comparison contest.
When requested for comment, Twitter provided an automated emoji response, while no immediate response was available from a Meta spokesperson.
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