As is known, on July 5, Meta (recognized as an extremist organization in the Russian Federation) launched its new Threads microblogging service. It is too soon to speak about the success of the project, which is a direct competitor to Twitter (now X). But we can be sure that the spike in popularity of the Threads corporate messenger, which is not related to Meta, is one of the first and obvious results.
This messenger is in many ways similar to the better known Slack, but until recently, it was much less popular. Perhaps now that will change. The messenger site runs in the Threads.com domain. It is not known if Meta tried to acquire this domain in preparation for the launch of its Threads service, but it is clear that if they tried, they did not succeed. As a result, the microblogging service was launched in the Threads.net domain. The result was quite predictable. Despite the fact that there have long been over a thousand generic top-level domains, .COM remains the default domain for many users. And many US residents are not aware that other domain zones exist.
According to TechRound, citing the data of Venture Smarter (a consulting firms that shares business tactics for small and medium-sized businesses), Threads.com had 88,011 unique visitors in June and 10.78 million in July. Before Meta’s Threads launch, Threads.com occupied a modest 545,741st place in the most visited websites ranking, but in just two weeks, it shot up to 5,813rd place.
Threads and its team may not gain anything from this traffic surge: it is clear that visitors were looking for Meta’s Threads website and left Threads.com as soon as they realized their mistake. However, there is another interesting statistic. The number of downloads of the Threads mobile app on Google Play through June averaged 2,600 per month. In July, it exceeded one million. And even if we assume that many downloaded the corporate messenger believing that it was the “new Twitter,” the fact remains that by failing to secure the most appropriate domain name for their project, Meta gave a significant boost in popularity and recognition to another product. And in a very subtle irony of fate, the Threads.com messenger was created by three former Facebook employees.
