Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on February 1 said that its text-based conversation app Threads now has more than 130 million monthly active users, underscoring the growth witnessed by the app designed as a direct rival to Elon Musk-owned X (previously Twitter).
This number is up from nearly 100 million monthly active users Threads had reported in October 2023.
During Meta's earnings conference call, Zuckerberg said that Threads is "growing steadily" and noted that the app now has more people actively using it today than it did during its initial launch peak.
"I'm optimistic we can keep the pace of improvements and growth going, and show that a friendly discussion-oriented app can be as widely used as the most popular social apps," he said.
In July 2023, Zuckerberg had said that he expects Threads to become the next billion-user social network in its suite of apps, which includes Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger.
For context, X owner Elon Musk said in September 2023 that the platform has 550 million monthly active users.
Read: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg joins fight against Apple, calls new EU App Store policies 'onerous'
Meta-owned Instagram launched Threads in July 2023 and achieved 100 million sign-ups in less than five days, making it the fastest-growing consumer product in the world. However, its usage declined significantly in the following months.
This was partly due to Threads' initial feature set, which lacked several basic features, including keyword search, a fully functional web application, and the ability to support multiple accounts.
However, in subsequent months, Meta has rapidly added these features to Threads, along with others such as voice posts and an edit button for all users.
These changes have resulted in usage and downloads bouncing back on the app. Threads saw its daily downloads nearly triple to 28 million downloads in December 2023, as per app intelligence firm Appfigures.
Meta's recent efforts to showcase posts from Threads on Instagram and make the app available in the European Union in December 2023 also likely fueled the growth of Threads.
Last month, the social networking giant started a test where posts from Threads accounts became available on Mastodon and other services that use the ActivityPub decentralised social networking protocol. This move came as the company looks to deliver on its promise to make the social network interoperable.
ActivityPub is an open social networking protocol established by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) that powers services such as Mastodon (social networking), Pixelfed (photo sharing), and PeerTube (video sharing) among others.
Meta CFO Susan Li mentioned during the call that they remain focused on introducing additional features and further scaling the community in 2024, without disclosing any further details.
Meta said that its suite of apps is now being used by 3.98 billion users monthly as of December 31, 2023, registering a 6 percent year-over-year increase. Of this, an average of 3.19 billion people used these apps on a daily basis for December 2023, an 8 percent increase year-over-year.
The social networking giant posted total revenues of $40.1 billion for the fourth quarter of 2023, a 25 percent increase from $32.2 billion. Net income was $14.02 billion for the quarter, a 200 percent jump from $4.65 billion in the same quarter last year.
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