CEO of Meta Mark Zuckerberg claims that Threads, the company’s new social networking platform, has lost more than half of its subscribers.
Within five days of its inception earlier this month, the Twitter competitor soared to more than 100 million users.
But Mr. Zuckerberg acknowledged that those figures have now dropped.
The ideal situation would be for all or even half of the more than 100 million signups to remain active. We haven’t arrived yet,” he declared.
In a call to employees that the Reuters news agency overheard, Mr. Zuckerberg described the situation as “normal” and predicted that retention would increase as new features were added to the program.
The minimal capabilities that Threads offered at introduction drew criticism.
Since then, Meta has expanded its ability to translate messages into multiple languages and added additional features like distinct “following” and “for you” feeds.
Chris Cox, the business’s chief product officer, informed colleagues that the company was now concentrating on creating more “retention-driving hooks” to keep users returning to the site.
He used the phrase “making sure people using the Instagram app can see important Threads” as an example. The two platforms are tightly 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 business has made on the Metaverse, a virtual reality world that has yet to be developed.
He added that he didn’t expect it to become widely used until the following decade and that progress on the augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) technology that would power it was “not massively ahead of schedule, certainly on track.”
Given that Reality Labs, a branch of Meta that creates VR headsets and other products, has accrued multi-billion dollar losses, the prediction would contribute to worries that Meta has invested too much time and money in the universe of Meta.
However, the business as a whole continues to do well financially; this week, it reported a $7.79 billion profit for the most recent quarter.
In addition, Mr. Zuckerberg discussed another newsworthy topic: his proposed cage match with fellow tech mogul Elon Musk.
The two guys stated in June that they were both interested in a fight from the safety of their the keyboard and even going so far as to suggest a location in the city of Vegas.
On the phone, though, Mr. Zuckerberg responded that he was as “not sure if it’s going to come together” when questioned about it.