On Monday, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, announced that the number of registrations for Threads had reached 100 million over the weekend. Zuckerberg noted that this was primarily organic demand, with minimal promotional activity. The milestone, reached just five days after launch, far exceeded expectations.
The rate at which Threads hit 100 million registered users even surpassed that of OpenAI's generative chatbot, ChatGPT. ChatGPT managed to amass over 100 million users in two months, an expansion speed unheard of at the time. By comparison, it took TikTok about nine months and Meta-owned Instagram roughly 2.5 years to reach the same mark.
However, it's important to consider that Threads and Instagram share secure interconnectivity, allowing users to log in directly with their Instagram accounts and opt to import personal profiles and external account links from Instagram. The default recommendation focuses on friends from Instagram. Given Instagram's over one billion regular users, the popularity of Threads, the new app, is understandable. Compared to ChatGPT, it can be said that Threads was "born with a silver spoon."
Analysts pointed out that Threads still has considerable room for growth as the app has yet to launch in Europe due to some complex regulatory issues that need to be addressed.
Last Wednesday, Meta announced that users could download Threads for free from the Apple App Store and Google Play in more than 100 countries. The app's user growth exploded, with over 2 million registrations in the first two hours of launch, over 5 million after four hours, over 30 million in 16 hours, and 70 million in less than two days.
At launch, Meta described Threads as a "text-based conversation app" for Instagram. Users soon discovered that it was a replication of Twitter. The majority of posts on Threads at present are text-based, with a maximum limit of 500 characters per post. Due to its recent launch, Threads lacks some features common in mainstream social media. Though Threads does not yet have paid advertising, many brands have already joined the platform.
Investment bank Evercore ISI recently suggested that while Threads is still in its early stages, it's expected to generate substantial revenue for Meta. Threads is projected to reach nearly 200 million daily active users within the next two years and generate an estimated $8 billion in annual revenue.
Compared to this forecast, Meta's revenue last year was $117 billion, with over 3 billion active users. Analysts on average estimate Meta's revenue for fiscal year 2025 at $156 billion, far exceeding the estimated $8 billion in annual revenue from Threads. However, the outlook for Threads appears favorable when compared to Twitter, which had a revenue of $5.1 billion in its last full year before going public. Last summer, in its final financial report as a publicly traded company, Twitter stated that its monetizable daily active users were close to 238 million.
The threat from Threads to Twitter is substantial. Meta executives, such as Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri, have highly praised Threads as a more positive "public square," particularly for those who have never truly embraced Twitter.
Traffic data corroborates this. Cloudflare's CEO shared a graph showing a "decline" in Twitter's user traffic since the launch of Threads.
According to data analysis firm Similarweb, Twitter's web traffic fell 5% compared to the previous week in the initial two days when Threads became widely available. Twitter's web traffic was down 11% compared to the same period in 2022.
On Monday, Twitter's newly appointed CEO, Yaccarino, reported that Twitter's single-day usage last week hit a new high since February.
Twitter owner Elon Musk appears to have shown some concern over the robust performance of Threads. His attorney, Alex Spiro, sent a letter to Meta accusing the company of "illegally pilfering" trade secrets.
Recently, Musk and Zuckerberg, two Silicon Valley heavyweights, have been sparring and even challenging each other at a distance. Initially proposing a "cage fight," they later suggested upgrading to a "gladiator fight." Over the past weekend, the two traded jabs again, with Zuckerberg mocking Musk's tweeting style and Musk referring to Zuckerberg as a derogatory term, using particularly piquant language.
