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(It was expected to put Musk’s Twitter on its back)

Listening to millennials and Gen Zs, the man who gave the world Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg’s new social media app Threads was going to make Twitter obsolete.

Wow, another application that was going to change the world.

In my time I have heard how Snap Chat, Groupon, Slack, Wickr Me, Cluster – all was going to revolutionise the world and those who were not au fait were going to be left behind.

Now it’s all about Tik Tok and I’m still here, holding my own, doing my thing, still able to outwork these kids.

Threads was launched on July 5th and within its first five days attracted a whopping 100 million users-truly phenomenal.

At that trajectory maybe the kids were right, we were entering a new dawn and Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter for an obscene US$45 billion now looks like a terrible deal.

But hang on a minute.

By Bastille Day, the visitors to Threads dropped to 23.6 million according to Similarweb. Now it looks like Threads cannot retain visitors and X marks the spot.

Kids today don’t have the attention span and you can see that in every discipline.

When Threads was launched the average user rate was 20 minutes, today that’s down to less than 4 minutes.

Youth can be fickle.

While Threads was all the rage for a hot minute, Twitter saw engagement drop with users turning to Threads.

The way I see it, there was life before social media, a far better one where education and knowledge led the way.  Now everyone is a “Big Cheese” because of the number of followers they have. Only Fans has monetised femininity today. Go figure. You don’t have to work at anything simply upload some pictures of your fine self in your knickers.

When Threads first came out, it must have caused Musk some sleepless nights as Twitter now has negative cash flow and ad revenue has declined by 50 per cent.

With Threads, Zuckerberg is king of the big social media platforms, now controlling Facebook, What’s App, Instagram and Threads.

Musk took a shot at Threads when it first launched saying: “Threads is just Instagram minus pics, which makes no sense, given that thirst pics are the main reason people use that app. How many times have you read comments on Insta pics and wished there were more? Personally never.”

Ouch! 

It gets really interesting. Everyone is all hyped about Ai and what it will bring. Treads did what ChatGPT took two months to do, arrive at 100 million active users.

Now it is the end of July and Threads engagement has dropped 75 per cent with just 12 million active users. Twitter has more than 220 million daily active users and is still the big dog in the room.

Is it a false dawn for Zuckerberg’s Threads?

In a Threads post, Zuckerberg wrote: “ I’m very optimistic about how the Threads community is coming together. Early growth was off the charts, but more importantly, 10s of millions of people now come back daily.

“That was ahead of what was expected. The focus for the rest of the year is improving the basics and retention. It’ll take time to stabilise but once we nail that then we’ll focus on growing the community. We’ve run this playbook many times (FB, IG, Stories, Reels, etc) and I’m confident Threads is on a good path too.”