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 and Bluesky. They have considerably fewer users than even Threads but offer a non-trivial upgrade to users weary of being jerked around by the billionaire owner of their platform: decentralized protocols designed to let people take their business to somebody else’s server.
Meta has said Threads will adopt Mastodon’s ActivityPub protocol at some point, but for now it looks and feels like a version of Twitter without Musk popping up to post the occasional conspiracy theory or antisemitic trope.
Insider’s Enberg allows that Musk’s continued self-sabotage of his $44 billion purchase—most recently, his suggestion that he would charge people “a small amount of money” to use the company now known as X—may drive more people to Threads. But that’s not the same as Threads doing something to stand out in the social-media marketplace.
“For Threads to carve a long-lasting place in the social landscape, it needs to figure out what it wants to be when it grows up,” Enberg says in the report. “It must also do so fast: Meta isn’t above ditching new apps or folding them into existing services.”