Meta’s Twitter challenger app Threads is gaining momentum, and could be on a path to become the next major consideration in social media marketing. Though only as an organic platform at this stage.
Today, on Meta’s Q3 earnings call, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Threads is now up to 275 million monthly active users, rising from the 200 million MAU that Meta reported back in August.
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Which is a significant momentum shift.
For comparison, it took Threads 9 months to go from 100 million MAU to 175 million, at a growth rate of 8.3 million additional users per month. It’s now added 100 million more actives in just three months, more than tripling that early growth rate.
Which make sense when you consider that as more users come across, and more exclusive content gets posted, more people will then follow suit.
Threads has also benefited from Elon Musk’s sometimes chaotic changes at X, which have facilitated a rise in misinformation, particularly political falsehoods, in the app. Musk’s dedication to Trump’s re-election campaign has seen the app become increasingly filled with political discussion, led by Musk himself, which has turned many users off of the app.
Because a lot of people are sick of politics dominating their social feeds. Indeed, Meta has been working to move away from politics for this exact reason, based on user feedback which indicated that people were using Facebook less because of political divides.
But Musk, who’s gutted the former Twitter moderation team, in favor of putting more reliance on crowd-sourced Community Notes, has made politics a priority, as he seeks to use his own influence to get Trump back to the White House.
Maybe that’s what’s turned more X users off, maybe it’s the general feel of the app. But either way, Threads has been the main beneficiary, with the app now seemingly on track to become a real challenger for X in the real-time discussion space.
Though I maintain that Threads’ aversion to political content will impede its growth in this respect.
As a replacement for Twitter, Threads needs to facilitate all types of trending discussions, and restricting the reach and presence of certain topics seems to run counter to this. Though even then, 275 million is significant, and if it can maintain its current growth rate of a million more sign-ups per day (also noted by Zuckerberg in today’s earning call), that would mean that Threads will be on track to challenge X’s monthly active user count by around June next year.
Could that really happen? Could Threads really supersede X’s 500 million monthly active user count, and become the leader in this social media niche?
Again, I do think Meta needs to revisit its political limits, but aside from that, the growing momentum at the app does put it on a clear trajectory to become the next big platform.
Which for Meta will also mean ads, though Meta also noted on its earnings call that it doesn’t expect Threads to contribute to its revenue in 2025.
Meta has previously said that it’ll only consider rolling out ads on Threads once the app reaches a billion users, though some app researchers have noticed that Meta has already added Threads placements as a coming option for ad campaigns.
I doubt Meta’s going to be able to hold out till it reaches a billion actives. But then again, as Threads continues to gain momentum, that might happen sooner than any of us think either way.
But the bottom line is that Threads is emerging as a legitimate challenger to X. It’s still got a way to go, and things could change quickly. But the numbers show that Threads is seemingly on the right track.
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