In a blog post on Monday, Similarweb's David Carr said the drop of daily active users had been from 49 million to 23.6 million.

After Threads was launched on 6 July, it attracted more than 30 million users in its first 24 hours. That grew to 100 million within a few days, at a time when Twitter was facing serious setbacks.

But the enthusiasm was somewhat tempered when Instagram boss Adam Mosseri said in an interview that Threads would not be doing anything to encourage posts on politics and hard news - the main topics of interest to former Twitter users.

Carr said most of the number he had quoted [given below] were from Android users as it was easier to track users on this platform. Statistics about users on iOS would follow, he added.

He offered the following observations:

"On its best day, 7 July, Threads had more than 49 million daily active users on Android, worldwide, according to Similarweb estimates. That’s about 45% of the usage of Twitter, which had more than 109 million active Android users that day.

"By Friday, 14 July, Threads was down to 23.6 million active users, or about 22% of Twitter’s audience.

"Usage in the US, which saw the most activity, peaked at about 21 minutes of engagement with the app on 7 July. By 14 July, that was down to a little over six minutes.

"In the first two full days that Threads was generally available, Thursday and Friday, Web traffic to twitter.com was down 5% compared with the corresponding days in the previous week. Although traffic bounced back, for the most recent seven days of data, it’s still down 11% year-over-year.

"On the days of peak interest in Threads, Twitter’s Daily active users on Android, worldwide, were virtually unchanged, but time spent was down 4.3% – perhaps because some users were off trying Threads. Even with that drop, however, the average total time spent on Twitter was about 25 minutes."