A year and a half ago, Threads was just a glimmer in Mark Zuckerberg's eye.
Now, Elon Musk's x rival has reached more than 175 million monthly active users, Meta's CEO said. Announced On Wednesday.
As with any social network, and especially Threads, monthly users only tell part of the growth story. Tellingly, unlike facebook, WhatsApp, and instagram, Meta has yet to share daily user numbers. That omission suggests Threads still gets plenty of pass-through traffic from people who haven’t yet become regular users.
In recent months, Meta employees have told me that much of the app’s growth continues to come from its promotion within instagram. Both apps share the same account system, something that is not expected to change.
Still, 175 million monthly users for a one-year-old app is nothing to sneeze at, especially given Meta’s spotty track record of launching standalone app experiments over the years. Zuckerberg has been candid with me and others that he thinks Threads has a real chance to be the company’s next billion-user app. To keep the growth story going, I’m told that Meta is focusing on markets where it thinks there’s an opportunity to take more market share from x — Japan, for example.
For now, Threads remains a loss-making product for Meta financially, though it can certainly afford to fund it indefinitely. Internally, I’m told that executives are thinking about turning on ads on Threads sometime next year, though the exact plan is still up in the air. It’s easy to see how Threads could integrate into instagram’s existing ad system. And given Meta’s intentional decision to de-prioritize politics and encourage lighthearted content, it could be an attractive place for advertisers looking for a more brand-safe alternative to x.
“It would be great if it became really, really big, but I’m actually more interested in it becoming culturally relevant and getting hundreds of millions of users,” instagram head Adam Mosseri told me when Threads first launched. A year later, the app definitely has more progress to make on the cultural front. But the fact that it’s still growing means Meta has the runway to get there.
