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We examined the daily activity of Ellen DeGeneres, Wiz Khalifa, Selena Gomez and others among Twitter’s most-followed to deduce if Threads has staying power.
Yiwen Lu reports on youth and technology from San Francisco.
Threads, the new social app from Meta, had a fast start this month when it racked up 100 million downloads in less than a week. With so much momentum, the app seemed well on its way to dethroning Twitter.
But rapid downloads do not necessarily translate to long-term success. Now the question is whether Threads has staying power.
So we embarked on an experiment. We compiled a list of 15 of some of the most-followed celebrities and high-profile figures on Twitter who joined Threads, including Katy Perry, Ellen DeGeneres, Bill Gates, Britney Spears, Shakira and Oprah Winfrey. Then we compared their activity on Twitter with their activity on Threads every day since July 5, when Threads was released. We also looked at what they did on Instagram, which is owned by Meta and developed Threads.
The idea was to see which social platform kept the celebrities — who either declined to comment or didn’t respond to requests for comment — the most active. What we found is just an early snapshot, but it may provide some clues to where Threads is headed.
Ms. DeGeneres, who joined Twitter in 2008, had not tweeted since late April. When Threads rolled out, she was among the first 3,000 people to download the app.
“Welcome to Gay Twitter!” she posted on Threads on July 5. Her message quickly garnered over 7,000 replies.
The rapper was the only celebrity we followed who published a double-digit number of posts any day on Threads.
Note: The number of posts excludes replies, which could not be correlated by their date of publication, but does include both original posts and shares of other posts.
Source: Threads
By The New York Times
The number of days each celebrity was active on Threads, Twitter and Instagram between July 5 and July 25.
Note: Active days are days where celebrities made at least one post.
Sources: Instagram; Threads; Twitter
By The New York Times
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