Meta executives are heavily focused on boosting retention on their latest Twitter rival Threads, after the app lost greater than half of its users within the weeks following its buzzy launch, CEO Mark Zuckerberg told employees on Thursday.
Retention of users on the text-based app was higher than executives had expected, though it was “not perfect,” said Zuckerberg, speaking at an internal company town hall, the audio of which was heard by Reuters.
“Obviously, if you have got greater than 100 million people join, ideally it will be awesome if all of them and even half of them stuck around. We’re not there yet,” he said.
Zuckerberg said he considered the drop-off “normal” and expected retention to grow as the corporate adds more features to the app, including a desktop version and search functionality.
Meta is adding more “retention-driving hooks” to entice users to return to the app, like “ensuring people who find themselves on the Instagram app can see necessary Threads,” said Chief Product Officer Chris Cox.
An organization spokesperson declined to comment on the meeting.
Meta is adding more “retention-driving hooks” to entice users to return to the appREUTERS
The executives’ comments got here a day after Meta wowed investors with a rosy revenue growth forecast, an indication of a comeback for an organization that faced deep skepticism over its hefty spending on the metaverse last yr as ad sales plummeted.
The disclosure sent Meta’s shares surging 8% on Thursday. The stock prolonged its rally on Friday, gaining 4%.
Zuckerberg told employees on the decision that he believed the corporate’s work on the augmented and virtual reality technology that may power the metaverse was “not massively ahead of schedule, but on course.”
Meta, he added, needed to start investing in that work ahead of rivals resembling Apple, Google and Microsoft, given their years of experience constructing operating systems for existing products.
“Obviously, if you have got greater than 100 million people join, ideally it will be awesome if all of them and even half of them stuck around. We’re not there yet,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said.AFP via Getty Images
“That way, we have now all of the tools ready for when this is prepared for prime time,” he said, predicting that mass adoption of metaverse technologies would happen within the 2030s.
Zuckerberg and Cox also highlighted the corporate’s release of a synthetic intelligence model called Llama 2 this month, which it made freely available for industrial use to any developer whose services had fewer than 700 million users.
The model has received greater than 150,000 download requests within the week since its release, Cox said.
Responding to an issue on the proposed “cage match” against Elon Musk, Zuckerberg said he was “undecided if it’s going to come back together.”