CEO of Meta Mark Zuckerberg claims that Threads, the company’s new social media platform, has lost more than half of its users.
After launching earlier this month, the Twitter competitor quickly surpassed 100 million users.
But Mr. Zuckerberg acknowledged that those figures have since dropped.
“If you have more than 100 million people sign up, ideally it would be awesome if all of them or even half of them stuck around. We’re not there yet,” he said.
Zuckerberg described the situation as “normal” and predicted retention to increase as new features were added to the app.
Threads has previously received backlash for having limited functionality, such as limitations on what posts are shown and what content is available.
Chris Cox, chief product officer at Meta, informed the team that the company was now concentrating on incorporating more “retention-driving hooks” to keep users returning to the platform.
He cited the example of “making sure people who are on the Instagram app can see important Threads”. The two platforms are closely related; users need an Instagram account in order to sign up for Threads.
Additionally, Mr. Zuckerberg provided an update on the massive wager that the company has made on the Metaverse, a virtual reality environment that has yet to be created.
He said progress on the augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) technology that would power it was “not massively ahead of schedule, but on track”, adding that he didn’t anticipate it going mainstream until the next decade.
That forecast could fuel worries that Meta has invested excessive resources in the Metaverse given that its Reality Labs division, which creates VR headsets and other products, has incurred multibillion-dollar losses.
But the business as a whole is still doing well financially, as evidenced by this week’s announcement that the most recent quarter saw a profit of $7.79 billion.
Source-BBC
