What Happened to Threads? (A 2024 Update)

After becoming the fastest app ever to reach 100 million users last summer, Instagram's X (formerly Twitter) alternative, Threads, has fallen out of the news cycle and off many of our phone's homepages. At this point, you may be asking: what's going on with Threads, and should we still be paying attention to the app?

With Threads celebrating its half-birthday in January, it's a great time to dive into statistics on just how well (or poorly) the app is performing. According to SimilarWeb's statistics, Threads saw just 76 million visits in December, with an average session duration of about 3 minutes. Website visits are up from November by about 50% but don't hold a candle to X's 6.2 billion visits with an average session duration of over 11 minutes.

As mentioned, however, things are trending upward for Threads, with visits increasing by over 50% from November to December. Notably, December saw the release of Threads in Europe and the beginnings of testing with integration with the ActivityPub protocol, opening threads up to the entire federated universe – a topic we wrote about when Threads first launched. 

Late last year, Threads also launched tags and topics, allowing users to find new subjects to engage in and people to connect with, something that was sorely missing when the platform first launched. These tags don’t seem to have taken the same prevalence that hashtags on X do, so discoverability can still be difficult on the platform, especially with the drastically lower number of users of the platform. 

All in all, Threads has not become the hit that Mosseri and Zuck once hoped it would become, but there’s still a chance for growth with the continued updates the platform keeps pushing. For now, it doesn’t seem to be pushing the needle in one direction or the other for hospitality brands, but if we see any changes on that front, you can be the first to know by signing up for our newsletter.