Twitter traffic tumbles as Threads’ soars

Meta’s answer to Twitter arrived last week and has been on fire in terms of gaining users/downloads. It is touching close to 100 million downloads and looks like a genuine rival to Twitter in terms of offerings.

The data reveals that on day one most downloads came from India. Around 22% of the total downloads were from India, followed by Brazil and the US, which had 16% and 14% downloads respectively. On day one, as per the data, 25% of the downloads were on iOS whereas the remaining 75% were on Android.

The integration with Instagram certainly seems to have helped. As long as you have an Instagram account, you don’t need a separate account. As soon as you download Threads and open it, it will automatically show your Instagram handle to log in. There’s no password needed as long as you’ve Instagram on your phone and are logged in.

According to Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince, Twitter has been experiencing a notable decline in traffic since early 2023. According to domain name system (DNS) rankings data from Cloudflare, a network technology company, Twitter’s traffic has been steadily decreasing since January and reached a new low in July.

The recent launch of the Threads, the newest microblogging app seems to have a stronger impact on Twitter’s traffic. Currently, according to Cloudflare, Twitter holds the 37th position in domain ranking, a decline from its 32nd position in January 2023. This sharp drop strongly suggests that Twitter is losing traffic, and the launch of the Threads app is likely to further contribute to this decline.

After Elon Musk acquired Twitter for a staggering $44 billion in 2022, he has implemented various inconvenient changes to the platform, which have prompted users to seek alternative platforms like Mastodon and Bluesky as well as Threads by Instagram.

With limitations on daily post access and essential features like SMS-based two-factor authentication now behind a paywall, the new Twitter management is actively encouraging users to subscribe to the Blue service to maximise their Twitter experience, which has also received a lot of backlash from its 450+ million user base.