Meta’s monetisation of Threads “can’t happen too soon” according to a social media advertising analyst as Twitter’s ad buying and overall traffic continues to decline.
Traffic to Twitter’s ads buying portal was down 20 per cent year-over-year in June, according to Similarweb data, while overall user traffic has dropped 4.2 per cent in June and web traffic was down 11 per cent year-over-year.
Threads’ user base, meanwhile, has exploded and left the app to become the fastest-growing social media platform ever.
But, despite Threads usage dropping by half compared to its initial surge, David F. Carr, Similarweb’s senior insights manager, has said that Meta “appears to have a hit on its hands” and needs to get cracking on monetisation.
“Traffic to the business portal shared by advertisers on Facebook, Instagram, and presumably someday soon Threads has been dropping, down about 10% year-over-year in June,” he explained.
Meta had previously said that it would not be looking to monetisation Threads until 2024.
Of course, a drop in user engagement would normally be expected following an initial surge in activity for a new social media site.
“We did see engagement drop somewhat over the weekend, and on Monday we estimate Threads had 36.6 million active users on Android,” added Carr.
“While there was intense interest in checking out the app initially, not every user has made a habit of visiting Threads as often as they might other social apps.”
However, Threads does feel particularly barebones compared to Twitter, lacking a proper search functionality, for example.
“I’m very optimistic about how the Threads community is coming together,” wrote Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on the app.
“Early growth was off the charts but more importantly 10s of millions of people now come back daily. That’s way ahead of what we expected. The focus for the rest of the year is improving the basics and retention. It’ll take time to stabilise, but once we nail that then we’ll focus on growing the community.
“We’ve run this playbook many times (FB, IG, Stories, Reels, etc) and I’m confident Threads is on a good path too.”
Twitter and Facebook, however, both saw significant decreases in engagement with advertisers in June, with TikTok and Snapchat, in particular, seeing huge gains, according to Similarweb analysis.
But, in the grand scheme of things, Facebook continues to dominate social media advertising spend. Though, Carr noted that the below chart is exaggerated by the fact that its business portal is used for purposes other than advertising, such as organic postings on behalf of a brand.
