Zuck’s Threads losing battle against Musk’s X in South Korea

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is losing a fight against Tesla CEO Elon Musk in the South Korean short-form social media platform sector.

Threads, Meta’s rival to X, formerly Twitter, ranked 14th with about 730,000 monthly active users (MAUs) in July on the list of South Korean social networking services and online communities, according to a local market tracker IGAWorks Inc. on Tuesday. According to hours of use, Threads came in at No. 20 with some 470,000 hours during the month.

On the other hand, X had 4.6 million MAUs, securing the No. 6 spot in the category and its hours of use ranked fourth with 62.7 million hours.

Threads subscribers used the platform introduced on July 5 for 6.9 days and 0.6 hours on average last month, far lower than X users’ 19.3 days and 13.6 hours.

The number of Threads users and new installations has been falling since the second week of its launch. The number of daily users of the service increased to about 250,000 on July 12 in South Korea, one of the most wired countries in the world, but has been declining since then to some 110,000 on Aug. 6. The number of new installations of the app tumbled to around 10,000 on the day from about 130,000 on July 7.

TO FIGHT BACK WITH NEW FEATURES

Threads is also losing the battle around the world. It attracted 100 million users in the first five days of the launch but the initial boom did not last long.

Threads’ hours of use nosedived by 85% within a month of its introduction, while the number of its daily users shrank to less than 10 million from the initial 50 million, according to Israeli web analysis firm SimilarWeb Ltd., X’s daily users have topped 300 million.

Meta aims to fight back against X with new features. It added functions that allow users to easily check their followers and view posts of their followers in chronological order.

Zuckerberg earlier this month said Meta was working on adding features for better search capabilities.

The company also plans to launch Threads’ web version, foreign media reported.

“We’ve been using an early version internally for a week or two,” Adam Mosseri, CEO of Instagram, a photo and video sharing SNS owned by Meta, posted on Threads last week, adding that it “still needs some work” before wide release.

Write to Seung-Woo Lee at leeswoo@hankyung.com
 

Jongwoo Cheon edited this article.