Locking Horns With Elon Musk Costs Mark Zuckerberg a Fortune – Twitter Rival App ‘Threads’ Loses More Than 50% Users
As confirmed by Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s Threads, the rival of the Twitter app, lost more than half of its users after the launch.
Meta platforms’ Threads is the new social media app that’s designed to offer a more personal and intimate experience than any other platform. The application surpassed ChatGPT and garnered 100 million users within 5 days of its launch, but this number dropped down to around 50 million.
Mark Zuckerberg Brings Positivity Amidst Chaos
CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged users’ decline in the call to employees, saying he believed it was quite normal for the new apps to lose users after the initial launch. He said,
“If you have more than 100 million people sign up, ideally it would be awesome if all of them or even half of them stuck around. We’re not there yet.”
Read More: Elon Musk Agrees to Train With UFC God for the Billionaire MMA Fight Against Mark Zuckerberg
Zuckerberg expected the retention to see improvement with the company adding further features to the app. However, Threads got criticized for the limited function it offered after launch. Since then, Meta has added some new features like For You feeds, Following, and others, like trying to increase the scope for translating posts in different languages.
The company’s Chief Product Officer, Chris Cox, addressed the staff, saying that Meta plans to add further retention-driving hooks for drawing people back to the platform.
CPO Cox brought forward a strategy of ensuring that people who are on Instagram can see the important Threads, with the aim of increasing user engagement. Meta tied the two platforms closely. It means to sign up for Threads, one must have an Instagram account.
Mark Zuckerberg Updates Employees on Metaverse
Seeing the numbers stumble with Threads, Zuckerberg updated employees on the enormous bet of Meta on the yet-to-be-created Virtual Reality world, Metaverse. He asked the employees to work towards Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality tech, which is expected to have a comeback for Meta, even though the progress is “not massively ahead of schedule, but on track.” According to his expectations, it isn’t going mainstream until the next decade.
The prediction made by Zuckerberg might intensify the concerns that Meta did dedicate a lot of money and time to the Metaverse- Reality Labs division, which is meant to produce VR headsets and other items, and it has racked multi-billion-dollar losses.
As a whole, the company is performing well financially, and it announced a profit of $7.79 billion in the last quarter.
The CEO of Meta further addressed another headline-creating issue- the proposed cage fight with Elon Musk, his fellow tech titan. It was previously indicated that both men were quite keen on the bout, and they even suggested one of Las Vegas’s venues. However, when Zuckerberg was pressed regarding it on call, he dismissed it saying, “Not sure if it’s going to come together.”
Even with this loss of users, Zuckerberg remains optimistic. But what will truly be Threads’ future, remains uncertain.
Source: Reuters
