Two weeks ago, Threads was the talk of the town after more than 100 million users signed up for the microblogging Twitter alternative in less than a week.
Two weeks later, Threads is again the talk of the town as the platform has failed to hold on to even half of those users as CEO Mark Zuckerberg told staff that not "even half of them stuck around," according to a Reuters report.
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But Zuckerberg is one of the godfathers of the social media era, so he knows probably better than most about the long slog that comes with trying to build a successful platform.
He offered some insight into his thinking on the issue during the company's earnings call this week.
"I'm quite optimistic about our trajectory here. We saw unprecedented growth out of the gate... and now we're focused on retention and improving the basics, and then after that we'll focus on growing the community to the scale that we think is going to be possible," Zuckerberg said.
Despite the retention issues, Zuck seems genuinely happy with the way Threads has performed since its inception.
"Threads has been dramatically more than we expected in terms of the adoption and the rate of that. We thought this was going to be kind of a project that we just – we had a small team working on for a while, but it really blew up and created a big opportunity immediately," Zuckerberg said.
But he also acknowledged that there is still much to be done to make the product have the same type of success as Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger.
"I'd say we have a lot of work to do to really make Threads reach its full potential," he said.
"I'm highly confident that we're going to be able to pour enough gasoline on this to help it grow ... And then in a few years once we get to the point where it's at hundreds of millions of people, assuming we can get there, then we'll worry about monetization. But I mean, that's basically the playbook that we're focused on."
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