It has been alleged that mismanagement at Twitter has been going on for months, if not years, and has resulted in large layoffs, frequent service interruptions, and an exodus of key advertisers. However, the launch of a competing app by Meta may prove to be the last straw that breaks the camel’s back for Twitter.
Threads surpassed 100 million users over the weekend, less than a week after it launched, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Monday. This is a remarkable achievement for any social network, and it puts Threads on track to quickly pass Twitter in terms of audience size.
In the meantime, a number of internet traffic specialists have claimed that Twitter usage has dropped noticeably in the space of just the past few days. The findings highlight the threat that Meta poses to Twitter’s business and raise issues about whether or not Twitter can stop losing money and how it can do so if it can.
03 Elon Musk Mark Zuckerberg SPLIT
After seeing its competitor app Threads gain popularity, Twitter has indicated that it may sue Meta.
According to data provided by Cloudflare, a business that specialises in internet infrastructure, and Similarweb, a company that performs web analytics, the volume of traffic on Twitter had already been declining for some months. The rate of reduction, however, seems to have quickened over the past few days, according to statements made by both firms. This is likely due to a high level of interest in Threads as well as a mass movement from the platform owned by Elon Musk to the one managed by Zuckerberg.
A request for comment sent to Twitter was not immediately met with a response.
On Sunday, the Chief Executive Officer of Cloudflare, Matthew Prince, posted a chart that compared the popularity of Twitter to that of other websites that his company monitors. “Twitter traffic is tanking,” Prince stated as he uploaded the chart.
According to the report, Twitter held a position of 32nd on the list back in January, but by February, it had dropped all the way down to 34th. Twitter remained around between the 35th and 37th positions for the majority of the spring. The beginning of July, however, demonstrated a precipitous decline in popularity, with Twitter falling all the way down to the fortieth position. (The popularity of a domain is described by Cloudflare as the “size of a population of users that look up a domain per unit of time.”)
According to David Carr, a senior insights manager at Similarweb, “in the first two full days that Threads was generally available, [last] Thursday and Friday, web traffic to twitter.com was down 5% compared with the same days of the previous week and down 11% compared with July 6 and 7, 2022,” “We’ve been reporting for a while that Twitter is down compared to last year – traffic in June was down 4% – but Threads seems to be taking a bigger bite out of it,” said one of our employees.
The personal experiences of a few of Threads’ users provided additional evidence to support the traffic reports. Alex Stamos, director of the Stanford Internet Observatory, stated on Saturday that he conducted a “unscientific test” to determine how his audience reacted to the identical post that he shared on Twitter, Threads, and Mastodon, another competitor, over the course of 23 hours.
Despite having a fraction of his usual reach on the newer platform, Stamos said that the identical content he created for both platforms received significantly more engagement on Threads than it did on Twitter. This engagement was measured by the number of likes and replies received by the content.
Stamos, who has more than 100,000 followers on Twitter but only a tenth of that number on Threads, added that strong engagement on Threads with his posts describing the “research” also supported the initial findings. Threads is ten times less popular than Twitter. According to his observations, the quality of the responses to his posts on platforms other than Twitter was significantly higher.
“From my perspective, Twitter is done as a platform for serious tech conversations,” said Stamos, who had previously served as the chief security officer at Facebook.
A competitor to Twitter, but not quite a replacement for Twitter
Meta’s use of Instagram as a springboard to sign up new users has been a major factor in Threads’ rapid growth. This factor, along with the fact that many Threads users have identified a dissatisfaction with Twitter, has also been a significant factor.
Threads began with a number of celebrity accounts that were already prepopulated on its platform. Since then, however, the platform has gained additional high-profile users such as Kim Kardashian and Jeff Bezos. A Twitter account that followed the movements of Elon Musk’s private jet and was subsequently suspended for its activity has now moved on to the new platform.
According to a report published by Axios last week, more than one hundred lawmakers from the United States have joined the platform as well. Despite this, it seems that very few world leaders are currently using Threads.
Both Mark Zuckerberg and Adam Mosseri, who is in charge of Instagram, have emphasised that Threads is about more than just replacing Twitter and that the app seeks to tap audiences that are outside of Twitter’s traditional user base. Threads was announced in October 2015. Mosseri described the risks associated with news and political content as “not at all worth the scrutiny, negativity (let’s be honest), or integrity risks that come along with them.” This means that Threads will not actively elevate content that is related to news or politics.
A discussion regarding the manner in which Mosseri’s views on news and politics are presented on Threads was sparked over the course of the weekend. Some users lauded it as a method for making the platform more accessible to average users, some of whom may have never used Twitter in the past. Others claimed that many of the areas Mosseri classified as non-political, such as music, fashion, and entertainment, are their own source of news and can be intrinsically political. These topics include music, fashion, and entertainment.
Even though Meta’s executives are attempting to create some distance between Threads and Twitter, it appears that the meteoric rise of Threads has only served to deepen Musk’s ongoing conflict with Zuckerberg. As a result of the debut of the app, legal action was threatened, and Twitter accused Meta of stealing trade secrets. There was also speculation about whether or not Musk and Zuckerberg would engage in a real-life brawl.
Musk, who is known for erratic behaviour and incendiary remarks, got it even more personal on Sunday by hurling a sexual insult at Zuckerberg and proposing that they compare the size of their respective genitalia. This is consistent with Musk’s reputation for erratic behaviour and incendiary remarks.
The slur has not been met with a direct response from Zuckerberg. However, when a user on Threads pointed out that the new app was not listed in Twitter’s current topics tab, Zuckerberg replied “Concerning” with a crying-laughter emoji to indicate that he found this to be surprising. And he used the same emoji to respond to a post made by the fast-food brand Wendy’s, which had suggested that Mark Zuckerberg should “go to space just to really make him mad lol.”
This article first appeared HERE