Meta Platforms executives are heavily focused on boosting retention on their new Twitter rival Threads, after the app lost more than half of its users in the weeks following its launch, CEO Mark Zuckerberg told employees on Thursday.
Speaking at an internal company town hall, Mr. Zuckerberg called the drop-off “normal,” adding that retention of users was still better than executives had expected, albeit “not perfect.”
“Obviously, if you have more than 100 million people sign up, ideally it would be awesome if all of them or even half of them stuck around. We’re not there yet,” he said.
The Threads team will be adding more features to the text-based app, including a desktop version and search functionality, in an effort to increase retention.
Meta is also looking to add what it calls “retention-driving hooks” to entice users to return to the app, like “making sure people who are on the Instagram app can see important Threads,” said Chief Product Officer Chris Cox.
The executives’ comments came after Meta reported surprisingly positive second-quarter earnings on Wednesday, further wowing investors with a rosy revenue growth forecast.
After implementing a cost-savings plan that resulted in about 21,000 job cuts to balance its stocks losing roughly two-thirds of its value last year, Meta’s net income rose to $7.79 billion, up 16 percent compared to last year.
The revenue disclosure sent Meta’s shares surging 8 percent on Thursday,
That said, Meta’s Reality Labs unit, which develops augmented and virtual reality technologies needed to power the Metaverse, suffered a $3.7 billion loss in 2023’s second-quarter, amounting to a total loss of $21 billion since the beginning of 2022.
Mr. Zuckerberg stated that the development of the Metaverse was “not massively ahead of schedule, but on track.” He added that it was important that Meta keep investing in the Metaverse to stay ahead of rivals such as Apple, Google, and Microsoft.
“That way, we have all the tools ready for when this is ready for prime time,” he said, predicting that mass adoption of Metaverse technologies would take place in the 2030s.
Mr. Zuckerberg and Mr. Cox also highlighted the company’s release of an artificial intelligence model called Llama 2, which is available freely for commercial use to any developer whose services have fewer than 700 million users.
Since its release on July 18, the AI model has been downloaded 150,000 times, Mr. Cox said.
When asked about his proposed “cage match” against Elon Musk, Zuckerberg said he was “not sure if it’s going to come together.”
Reuters contributed to this report.
