For Threads, Usage Is What Matters, Not Downloads

It’s July, which means on the East Coast it’s hot and humid and in San Francisco it’s winter. It also means we’re in a news desert, which partly explains the breathlessness (not to mention brainlessness) of much of the coverage of Threads’ rapid rise to 100 million downloads.  Leave aside the fact that it’s easier to get to 100 million downloads quickly when you’re mining an existing user base like Instagram (and not letting people cancel without canceling their Instagram account as well). The bigger point is that usage, not downloads, is the most important metric for an app. Exhibit A is Google+, which drew 90 million “users” six months after it launched in 2011 but eventually shut down because no one spent any time on it. As for Threads, we have no idea how many of the 100 million people who have downloaded the app so far are actually using it. 

Let’s assume, for argument’s sake, that six months from now a decent portion of the audience that downloaded Threads is using it frequently. The next question to ask is what that usage is replacing. After all, as people are now spending more than four hours a day on mobile apps, usage of Threads seems more likely to displace usage of other apps than add to the total time spent on apps generally. Some migration is likely coming from Twitter, judging by the number of Twitter users who are bragging on Twitter about how they’ve moved to the new app. (It may also be significant that Twitter’s traffic is down, according to this report today in The Wall Street Journal). But Threads is a little different from Twitter—partly because it’s steering clear of politics and news, and partly because your Threads feed is full of people you haven’t elected to follow. Both those factors severely limit how much of a Twitter replacement it can be. Almost by definition, time spent on Threads will likely come at the expense of a bunch of apps in addition to Twitter—most obviously Instagram, whose users form Threads’ base.