Big names are leaving Twitter in favor of Mark Zuckerberg’s new platform Threads.
Among them are highly influential personalities like Ellen DeGeneres, Oprah Winfrey, Jennifer Lopez and AOC – and they’re being followed by regular users too.
On Monday morning Zuckerberg claimed that 100 million people had signed up for the new social media platform in just five days, making it the fastest-growing social network ever.
Driving much of the migration away from Twitter is that Musk has alienated the platform’s liberal faction with his relaxed approach to content moderation. That also spooked advertisers and cut into the company’s revenue, which has dropped by around 40 percent since 2022.
Online traffic monitoring services have also indicated that in just a few days the number of visitors to the twitter.com domain had taken a hit.
On Monday, CNBC reported that web traffic to Twitter was down five percent for the first two full days Threads was generally available, compared with the previous week.
The fast-growing popularity of Threads seems to have rattled Musk. On Thursday an attorney for Twitter indicated the company might even sue Meta – its parent company – for hiring former staff with access to its trade secrets.
Elon Musk may have lost around $30billion on his investment in Twitter, from which a number of high-profile users are now fleeing in favor of Zuckerberg’s ‘kinder’ app Threads
Ellen DeGeneres and Oprah Winfrey were among the first to join Threads
Driving the migration of many users away from Twitter is a hostile political environment on the platform caused in part by Musk’s relaxed approach to content moderation
Online data service Quiver Quantitative reported that the app passed 100 million users at 3am EST
Zuckerberg has opted to capitalize on the fact swathes of Twitter’s old user base started to feel disenfranchised.
Some Twitter users expressed concern the platform has not done enough to curtail hate speech and that it is descending into a far-right forum are now loudly and proudly jumping ship.
His new platform presents itself as a ‘friendly’ alternative to Twitter for users that dislike Musk and the direction he is taking the company. Gordon Ramsey and Shakira were among the first to hop on board.
Users can port their Instagram followers to Threads, so Ramsey and Shakira had 1 and 3.4 million followers respectively within days of the platform’s launch.
Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez – known to have had multiple spats with Musk himself – is now very active on the Threads. Nonetheless, she was still using Twitter on Monday afternoon.
The Washington Post was also among the first 260,000 users, according to the New York Observer, and The New York Times followed suit shortly after.
Other outlets like the Miami Herald and the Charlotte Observer were also on the app. DailyMail.com is also on Threads.
Actress Sarah Jessica Parker was also among the first to get on Threads and in her very first post indirectly addressed the politically fraught social media climate.
‘@threadsapp might prove to be a platform where folks are kind, thoughtful, don’t feel encouraged to be mean, aggressive or hostile, there are other channels for that,’ she wrote. ‘This could be a new day.’
An interesting exception to the trend was the presence of conservative personality and founder of Turning Point USA Charlie Kirk on Threads.
Investigative journalism non-profit ProPublica was also very active on the app, not only did it create its own profile but it also created a list of its reporters that had also created accounts.
Actress Sarah Jessica Parker was also among the first to get on Threads and in her very first post she indirectly addressed the politically fraught social media climate
Jennifer Lopez has posted regularly on Threads within just a few days of its launch
Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, known to have had multiple spats with Musk himself, is now very active on Threads
Zuckerberg’s foray onto Twitter’s turf will not only be an affront to Musk’s ego but also affect the value of the company, for which he paid $44billion in October..
After the acquisition, Twitter became a private company and was delisted from the New York Stock Exchange in November, meaning it cannot be valued according to market capitalization.
But Fidelity Investments suggested in later May its own stake in the company had plummeted in value since October, implying Twitter was then worth just $15billion – a third of what Musk paid for it.
Daniel McCarthy, a professor of marketing at Emory University and a co-founder of Theta Equity Partners, said the woeful Fidelity valuation was likely driven in part by the fact Musk overpaid for Twitter.
‘The marking to market of Twitter by Fidelity was likely driven by a combination of $44B being a high price for the acquisition, coupled with the severe decline in revenue,’ he told DailyMail.com in an email.
While Musk may have brought Twitter closer to being profitable through aggressive cost-cutting, most readily cuttable costs have now been cut. That means if revenues drop any more than they have already, profits will be eaten into fast.
McCarthy suggested Twitter revenue is now down around 40 percent from $5.1billion in 2022 to around $3billion annualized. But Musk’s costs, he says, are also down a whopping 45 percent, from around $5.5billion to $3billion.
‘If Threads takes off, more individuals (like me) will spend more time on Threads than they will on Twitter. Naturally, this will drive a decline in Twitter ad exposures that advertisers could bid on, which would drive a further decline in ad revenue,’ he wrote.
Gordon Ramsey and Shakira were among the first to hop on board. Shakira had 3.4million followers on Monday
Users can port their Instagram followers to Threads, so Ramsey had a million followers within days
Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare, shared a screenshot to Twitter on Sunday of a chart suggesting that traffic on the platform was ‘tanking’
‘It does not appear that there is much more room for Musk to cut additional operating expenses, so this incremental loss of revenue could translate dollar-for-dollar into loss of profits.’
While Twitter has introduced subscriber-only exclusive features, McCarthy indicated that any extra revenue generated by that means is likely to be negligible.
Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare, shared a screenshot to Twitter on Sunday of a chart suggesting that traffic on the platform was ‘tanking’.
MSNBC’s report that Threads has seen a drop in users, was backed up by domain data. The data showed just weeks ago, Twitter ranked as the 34th most popular website, according to Cloudflare Radar. Now, it ranks 39th.
To start the year, just shortly after Musk’s takeover, Twitter ranked as the 32nd most popular website.
According to McCarthy such a loss of traffic could represent the beginning of the end for Twitter and noted he wouldn’t be surprised if many of those invested in the platform will be starting to think about the possibility of a default.
