Meta’s newsy app, Threads, joins Quibi as my picks for the biggest failures of all time. To be fair, you have to win big before you can fail big. So, I see their glasses as half full.
In both cases: rich, smart, successful people thought they had found large markets with unmet needs. Nope. We didn’t a rotating movie app – Sorry, Jeff and Meg. You didn’t thread the news needle. Sorry, Mark.
People are saying it’s because Threads was an incomplete product – an MVP. They’re ignoring the pachyderm at the portico.
Here is the reason: Threads isn’t Instagram.
Matty, text me to tell me you weren’t thinking, “Um. Ok. Yea. Chocolate ain’t vanilla. Going to need more to go on.”
2.3b people use IG because it’s a place where you can set your brain to idle, gawk at glossy pics, and scroll your way to endorphins. I’m simplifying to make this bigger point…
96% of the time, 96% of us don’t give enough of a rat’s rump about newsy stuff to spend time with it when we can do just about anything else. Zuckerberg ported his peeps from Candy Land to Civilization and heard, “Hard pass.”
You don’t lose 96% of your users because your product lacks window-dressing. Threads had its key feature. It feeds you news… mostly as text.
Let’s all say the quiet part out loud so the people in the back can hear it:
We don’t need another mostly text-based news feed.
Threads. Post. Mastodon. Blue Sky. Hive. Artifact. All do feed news. All are DOA.
Big companies, small companies, folks who started Instagram and Twitter, people at the smartest VC fund on earth… all set out to kill Twitter. They all failed.
The joke is on them. Twitter died years ago. It’s peak for most things outside sports, politics, and entertainment predates COVID. That’s why Elon is pivoting Twitter to be a catch all service. Because he knows our interest in news is finite. And satiated.
The very smart people at the Reuters Institute keep telling us what we do. We avoid news.
Even news junkies I know are getting sick of news. Sherry C.’s husband, Andy, is a news junkie who loves to hear that Trump got clobbered. Two months ago, Andy told me that he’s tired of “Trump got clobbered” news. Well — maybe not today.
So, what unsickens news?
Apples. No, not Apple. Apples.
Some of us will crunch away on the raw version because we find them yummy. Others will eat one day to keep physicians at bay. Most of us prefer them in pies. Or saucy. Or covered in caramel. We’re OK with some nutrition but it has to taste good.
Tasty news is convenient news.
If we’re on screen, we scroll. We scroll for an endorphin hit. Scrolling Instagram makes us happy. Scrolling Threads doesn’t make us happy. It’s a rare person who’s happy to leave a happy place to be less happy.
How many of people leave happy? The Threads data suggests it’s about 4%. Those 4%-ers subscribe to the New York Times. ‘Cause that makes them happy.
The rest of us will snack on news between our media meals. Those are times when we’re off-screen. Like when we’re in a car. Why – because we can’t scroll there. That’s a perfect time to catch up on small, streamy news treats in audio form. Ask Spotify.
That’s the time to hear:
+ Barbenheimer topped the box office again this week.
+ Your team won.
+ That celebrity whose pictures you gawk at on Instagram bought her own plane.
Or, you could be in the car and hear this happy little talk-bit about Christopher Lloyd going back to the past with his Back to the Future friends.
[Apologies, it’s tough to get a picture of a Car Play app on your dashboard when you’re stopped at a red light.]
You’d think the people who made Instagram would know people don’t want more text news. But their Artifact app repeats what’s old. You’d think the people who own IG would know this. But, Threads is the emperor’s newest Metaverse wardrobe. You’d think the guy who made Twitter would know this. But the grass ain’t greener under his Blue Sky.
Threads failed because it’s not Instagram and because there’s no product market fit for not happy. Audio — at the right time, in the right place can fix news for 96% of the people. Now that we fixed news you can return to your regularly scheduled scrolling.