“Can’t believe it’s only been 5 days!” Mark Zuckerberg wrote on Monday, 10 July 2023, announcing that Threads had passed 100 million sign-ups. The app had gone live on Wednesday, 5 July.
Meta built Threads through the Instagram team as a place for text updates and public conversation. Users sign in with an existing Instagram account, and the username and verification status carry over, though a profile can be customized for Threads. Posts run up to 500 characters and can carry links, photos and videos up to 5 minutes long. Anyone under 16, or under 18 in certain countries, starts with a private profile.
The numbers
Zuckerberg put the first hours at some 30 million downloads, according to The Hill, and said the total reached 70 million by Friday. Reuters reported that the 100 million mark came faster than it did for ChatGPT, which until then held the record for the fastest-growing consumer application. A UBS study cited by Reuters said ChatGPT took about two months after its launch.
“That’s mostly organic demand, and we haven’t even turned on many promotions yet,” Zuckerberg said in a Threads post.
A challenge to Twitter
Analysts quoted by Reuters saw Threads as the first serious threat to the Twitter app owned by Elon Musk. Musk had a different view. He mocked the newcomer over the weekend: “Threads is just Instagram minus pics, which makes no sense, given that thirst pics are the main reason people use that app.” He also threatened to sue Meta, alleging it used Twitter’s trade secrets and other confidential information to build the app. Legal experts told Reuters that claim could be hard to prove.
Twitter’s web traffic, meanwhile, was down 11% from the year before in the days after the launch, against a 4% year-on-year decline as of June, according to Similarweb figures cited by Reuters.
Threads was far from finished at launch. Reuters noted that it had no direct messaging, no desktop version and no hashtags or keyword search. Those gaps limit its appeal to advertisers and its use for following live events. There were no ads on the app, and Zuckerberg said Meta would think about making money only once there was a clear path to 1 billion users.
Instagram head Adam Mosseri had said the week before that Meta was not trying to replace Twitter. He described Threads as aimed at lighter subjects such as sports, music, fashion and design, while acknowledging that politics and hard news would inevitably appear. Meta also said it was working to make Threads compatible with open, interoperable social networks.
Sources
- Introducing Threads: A New Way to Share With Text (Meta newsroom, original post of July 5, 2023)
- Meta's Twitter rival Threads surges to 100 million users faster than ChatGPT (Reuters)
- Threads hits 100 million sign-ups within first week (The Hill)
