Threads is One Year Old and Growing

The Instagram spinoff from Meta had a huge launch in July 2023, followed by a dip in interest, but is growing in 2024.

Threads received a huge surge of interest following its launch on July 5, 2023, but building a regular and loyal audience has proven tougher.

Much of the magnitude of the original surge in interest about Threads was related to the way it launched as a spinoff of Instagram, which meant it could be accessed with a user’s existing Instagram account. However, only a fraction of the Instagram users who signed onto Threads in those early days made using the new app a regular habit.

Yet in the wake of a boom-and-bust cycle, Threads is now growing by both app active users and web traffic.

Key takeaways 

• If we compare Threads usage for August 2023 (the month after its initial launch) to May 2024, monthly active users are up 15.8% in the US and 6.3% in the UK, based on Similarweb estimates for iOS and Android combined.
• Worldwide traffic to the threads.net website is up about 9% for June 2024, based on a preliminary estimate, compared with the launch month of July 2023. June 2024 traffic was up 3.3% from May. 
• Initially, the website only served to promote the app, so July 2023’s traffic represents market interest more than actual usage. A more functional version of the website that allowed users to post content followed in late August. Web traffic has increased more than 175% from where it was in August.
• X still has about 9 times more monthly active users of its app than Threads, based on iOS and Android estimates for the US. Worldwide, X gets about 48 times more web traffic than Threads does.

After a huge but temporary initial surge in interest, Threads has slowly built its audience over the past year.

Here’s what that last year looked like based on daily active users of the Threads mobile app (showing estimates for the Android app in the US).

The pattern on the web looks similar. Originally, the threads.net website served to encourage people to download the mobile app, offering no more than read-only access to member profiles. It wasn’t until August 2023 that Meta launched a more full-functioned web version of the service.

The growth of Threads on the web looks better if we chart it by monthly visits, where the initial surge of excitement from early July is flattened out a bit by the traffic for the rest of that month – and overall, we can see that traffic is a little higher (by about 9%) for June 2024 than it was in July 2023.

Threads compared with X (Twitter) as an App

Part of the impetus for launching Threads was the perceived opportunity to build a text-based social network that would compete with Twitter (now X) and provide an alternative to those who disliked how it was managed under the ownership of Elon Musk. Created by the Instagram team at Meta Platforms Inc., Threads emphasized winning over mobile app users, but it has so far made only a modest dent in the audience of X.

To check app usage, we can look at monthly active user estimates for iOS and Android combined for the US and the UK.

In the US, X has about 9 times more monthly active users than Threads does.

In the UK, the gap in active users is not quite as wide, a ratio of about 3.6 to 1.

X’s user base is also shrinking, compared with where Twitter was a year ago, down -8.9% YoY in the US and -17.7% YoY in the UK. Threads doesn’t have quite a year of history, but compared with August 2023 (the first month for which we have both iOS and Android estimates), monthly active users are up 15.8% in the US and 6.3% in the UK.

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Contact: For more information, please write to press@similarweb.com.

Report By: David F. Carr, Senior Insights Manager

Methodology

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by David F. Carr

David covers social media, digital advertising, and generative AI. With a background in web trends since the 1990s, he’s also the author of "Social Collaboration for Dummies".