Indians lead Threads user base with 33%: Report

Indians are currently leading in terms of downloads of Instagram’s Threads, which now accounts for a third (33%) of the app's downloads globally, according to a new report published on Monday by app intelligence firm data.ai. They are followed by users in Brazil (22%), the US (16%), Mexico (8%) and Japan (5%) respectively. The report also said that after surpassing 100 million users on 11 July within just five days of its launch, the app has now touched over 150 million downloads in 10 days. 

On 6 July, Meta officially released Threads, that is based on Instagram’s account system, which, head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, mentioned, “Threads is designed for “public conversations” making it a direct competitor to Twitter. 

On 11 July, within just five days of its launch, Meta reported that Threads has already surpassed 100 million users, reaching the milestone dramatically faster than even ChatGPT. Until then, OpenAI's ChatGPT was known as one of the fastest-growing consumer products, hitting 10 million daily users in just 40 days and reaching 100 million monthly users in less than two months. 

The new data by data.ai also suggests that Threads has already achieved one-fifth of the weekly active user base of Twitter worldwide and 86 times the weekly active user base of the largest Twitter rival in the US, Truth Social, which had a weekly active user base of a million as of last week.

Another app research firm Sensor Tower on Saturday, however, showed Threads’ daily active users declined globally on Tuesday and Wednesday, down around 20% from Saturday. Time spent was also down by 50%, from 20 minutes to 10 minutes, the firm said. 

“The Threads launch really did ‘break the Internet’,” Anthony Bartolacci, managing director at Sensor Tower, a marketing intelligence firm, told CNBC in an article published on 13 July. “In the 10-plus years Sensor Tower has been estimating app installs, the first 72 hours of Threads was truly in a class by itself.” 

Nonetheless, Threads continues to enjoy a huge momentum, data.ai noted. However, users in Europe currently cannot access the app with Meta, facing uncertainties in the European Union (EU), due to regulatory hurdles related to privacy concerns and data collection practices.