The Russians have cooled off towards Threads – Kommersant

The average daily audience of Threads in Russia a few days after the launch reached about 100 thousand people, but then fell “two to three times”, calculated in Mediascope. The applications of the new service from Meta (its Facebook and Instagram activity has been declared extremist and banned in the Russian Federation) have fallen from the top positions of the App Store and Google Play ratings, and in the Russian segments of stores the drop turned out to be more pronounced than in the whole world, where the same trend is observed. Market participants say that Threads has no advantages over other social networks, and the transition of people from Twitter, which is not the most popular in the Russian Federation, is unlikely due to the difference in the culture of communication on the sites.

The accumulated audience of the Threads microblogging service in Russia for the week from July 10 to July 16 amounted to about 250 thousand people, Kommersant was told in Mediascope, citing estimates from the Cross Web project. We are talking about the number of people who at least once entered the service during this period. At the same time, analysts noted that if in the first half of the week Threads was visited by an average of about 100 thousand people a day, then by the end of the week the average daily audience decreased by two to three times: “Audience indicators are several times less than those of other, even small, social networks.” Almost 80% of the Russian audience of Threads are people from 18 to 44 years old, most of them women, Mediascope specified.

The fall in interest in Threads, which launched on July 6, is also evidenced by the position of the application in the ratings of app stores, measured by Sensor Tower. According to its service, the iOS app in the Russian segment of the App Store until July 12 was in first place in the overall rating of free downloads, and on July 20 it dropped to 29th place. The version of the application for Android, which until July 11 occupied the first line of all Google Play ratings in the Russian Federation, was last noted in the overall rating of free downloads on July 17 at 186th position. Threads for Android then only showed up in more segmented rankings, with the app ranked 14th in the social media apps rankings and 184th in the non-game rankings on July 20.

Threads usage rates are also falling globally: the number of daily active users of the service fell from 44 million on July 7 to 13 million on July 17, reports The Wall Street Journal with reference to Sensor Tower data. But in Russia, interest is falling even faster, as evidenced by the data.ai consolidated download rating: by July 20, the service’s applications dropped to 12th place in the world, to eighth in the US and to 232nd in Russia.

Detailed data on the use of Threads in Russia – for example, the average time of use – is difficult to collect, a Kommersant source in a telecommunications company clarifies: “Threads shares a network infrastructure with blocked Instagram, and therefore, with the greatest certainty, only the fact of visiting its website can be recorded.”

Right now, the Threads website only has an invitation to download the network’s mobile application; it does not have a web version.

Threads was created with the expectation that the microblogging service Twitter is still very popular in the US and it will have problems in connection with the arrival of Elon Musk, Vasily Cherny, director of strategic communications at Brand Analytics, notes: “In the Russian Federation, Twitter was relevant ten years ago and began to lose authors even before blocking in 2022.” He admits that some of the Russian-speaking Twitter users may switch to Threads, since “the product itself is made with high quality,” but there are unlikely to be more than 200-300 thousand active authors.

Project Director of Interium Aita Luzgina, however, urged not to count on this migration either: “The general atmosphere on the site does not correspond to the habits of Twitter, which is only worth the many jokes about the similarity of the Russian segment of Threads with Odnoklassniki.”

CROS CEO Ekaterina Movsetyan believes that the audience of Threads is only being formed and it is still premature to talk about a steady decline in interest in the network: “The decline is recorded relative to the initial influx of all those who were interested in seeing what kind of network it is.” The platform’s algorithms have not yet learned to adapt to the interests of each user, she notes: “Therefore, Threads still looks a lot like “interest chats” and does not provide additional value. If it does not appear, then the social network will face the fate of Clubhouse, the hype around which lasted six months.

Yuri Litvinenko