Threads Engagement Drops…. While It’s Confirmed That Threads Won’t Work In The EU At All

After an initial launch, it seems that Meta’s Twitter killer Threads has run into a couple of hiccups. The first is that engagement on Threads has dropped:

By the numbers: Daily active users were down about 20% on Tuesday and Wednesday this week from Saturday, marketing data firm Sensor Tower says.

  • Time spent has fallen from 20 minutes to 10 minutes.
  • Separate data from Similarweb revealed similar patterns — a more than 25% drop in daily active users between July 7 and Monday among Android phone users.

What they’re saying: Twitter competitor Threads “will need a more compelling value proposition than simply ‘Twitter, but without Elon Musk,'”Anthony Bartolacci, managing director at marketing data firm Sensor Tower, tells CNBC.

Interesting, but not a shock. I was privately wondering if people would remain engaged on Threads after getting an account. If they did, Elon and company would have a lot to worry about. But that apparently isn’t the case. So that might give Elon and company some hope. Key word: Some.

Also, if you’re going to the EU and wish to post to Threads, I have bad news for you. Threads isn’t going to work in the EU even if you’ve signed up for a Threads account in the US or any other place that Threads is available:

Recently, EU users began to notice they were suddenly unable to post on the new social media platform. Industry analyst Matt Navarra reached out to Meta to figure out what’s going on. In a statement given to Navarra, the tech giant admitted to taking extended “measures to prevent people [in EU] countries [from] accessing Threads,” which apparently includes blocking the use of VPNs that people often use to bypass online access restrictions.

Currently, the platform remains unavailable to most European nations. There are, of course, exceptions for non-members like the United Kingdom. Meta concludes its statement by saying it hopes to one day “bring Threads to more countries in the future” as Europe is an important market for the company.

That isn’t surprising either. Clearly Meta doesn’t want any trouble from the EU until they can figure out a way to launch Threads there that allows them not to run afoul of any EU laws, while at the same time being able to do Meta things. By that I mean gather up all the data on you that it can so that it make money off it it. It will be interesting to see if Meta course corrects on that front as that’s 100 million users that Meta would like to get their hands on.

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