Meta's Threads turns one, has more than 175 million active users
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Threads — Meta's "friendlier" version of X/Twitter — has amassed more than 175 million "monthly actives" since launching a year ago this week, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Wednesday morning.
Why it matters: While it's grown at a steady clip, Threads still lacks the scale and influence of the platform it set out to disrupt.
Zoom in: X said in March that it sees about 250 million people using the platform daily, and 550 million monthly.
- On Saturday, X owner Elon Musk posted that U.S. usage has reached an all-time high, though separate estimates depict quite the opposite pattern emerging.
Zoom out: Threads debuted during a tumultuous time for X.
- Musk's entanglement with the platform, starting with his initial post stating his intention to buy Twitter, had been ongoing for over a year and tweaked loyal users.
- Eventually, his controversial policy decisions, changes and public spats with company leaders pushed some users to Twitter alternative platforms, such as Mastodon and Bluesky.
By the numbers: Rushing to take advantage of the bad blood, Meta scooped up nearly 100 million monthly actives in the first three months of Threads' launch.
- By the end of 2023, that number had grown to 130 million, then more than 150 million as of the first quarter of this year.
Growth of Threads "continues to generally be on the trajectory I hoped to see," Zuckerberg told investors in April.
- "My daughters would want me to mention that Taylor Swift is now on Threads — that was a big deal in my house."
The big picture: Entertainment and music-related news are big drivers of engagement on Threads among Gen Z, according to a survey Meta conducted with Wakefield Research.
- Swifites are a big part of that trend, with TTPD, a tag about Taylor Swift's new album "The Tortured Poets Department" ranking as one of the top five tags over the past three months.
My thought bubble: Size and scale aren't the only factors that matter when it comes to measuring the success of social media platforms.
- TikTok and X, despite all the controversy that surrounds them, are vastly different in reach but both continue to give rise to news and trends that drive conversation.
- For Threads, it's not yet clear that "friendly" conversation can create the same kind of spark, and maybe that's what Meta wants.
What we're watching: Threads is primarily used for text-based posts, Meta's survey shows.
- Whether that drives the kind of engagement that the company can ultimately monetize is a big open question.
