Explainer: The real competition to Zuckerberg’s Threads
The ongoing feud between Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk has generated many moments memorable for their sheer insanity. One, of course, is the pair threatening a cage fight, the other is Zuckerberg launching an almost copycat version of Twitter, Threads, and only recently, the bizarre rebrand of Twitter to “X”.
But one tech firm has been an unlikely beneficiary of the high profile Silicon Valley spat: Threads.com.
No, it has nothing to do with the new app, linked to Instagram, instead it bills itself as a “replacement to Slack”.
The competitor to the messaging service normally has around 88,000 monthly visitors. In the two weeks since the Threads app was launch, 10 million people surged to the website, undoubtedly trying to hunt down the new Twitter.
Its web traffic was up 12,148 per cent as a result of Zuckerberg’s pet project. In July, 90 million people visited the website, according to SimilarWeb.
And while most people probably realised their mistake and went to hunt down the true app, the messaging service was downloaded one million times in a single month in Google Play. Before Threads was announced, the app had an average of around 2,600 monthly downloads.
According to Jon Morgan, chief executive of Venture Smarter, who conducted the analysis, “Threads work app has won the lottery for sharing a brand name with Meta’s latest social network.”
Undoubtedly, Zuckerberg won’t feel threatened with the 100 million people who downloaded his new app. However, the tech billionaire is struggling with longevity, with usage plummeting after an initial surge.
Maybe, in the end, it will be Threads.com who comes out on top.