Growth of Instagram Threads slowed down significantly according to Quicker Quantitative which is tracking public Threads user counts. While Treads added 100M users in the first 5 days it only added 17M more users in the following week.
More important than user numbers is user engagement. According to Newsnation, which is not citing it’s sources Threads engagement dropped sharply from an initial 20 minutes per user (per day?) to now 10 minutes per user. (per day?)
That in line with Mark Zuckerberg’s recent comments that put emphasis on user retention. (Source)
Early growth was off the charts, but more importantly, 10s of millions of people now come back daily.
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.
My assessment: I think “10s of millions of people” is probably describing a number to the lower 10s because otherwise, Zuckerberg could have stated e.g. “more than 50 million people”.
It is absolutely normal though to see engagement drop after initial interest dropped and it is a significant challenge to build activity into a new platform.
Given to slowdown of user growth and Zuckerberg’s comments I believe that it is likely that Instagram slowed down promotional activities as they have now enough users to test and iterate their product with.
Overall i believe it will be seen how the product is developing but initial interest is positive.
