Meta-owned Instagram's Twitter rival Threads has crossed 100 million users in less than five days of its launch, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on July 10, making it the fastest-growing consumer product across the world.
OpenAI's popular chatbot ChatGPT is estimated to have reached 100 million users in two months, while short video app TikTok took about nine months and Instagram itself took about two and a half years to reach the mark, industry analysts said.
Zuckerberg said Threads reached this milestone on "mostly organic demand and we haven't even turned on many promotions yet"
Instagram launched the text-based conversation app Threads, at a time when many Twitter users are looking for alternative services, frustrated by various product and policy changes by Elon Musk that have dramatically reshaped how the social media platform works.
These include paid verification, paywalling certain key features, introducing daily limits on tweets viewed and ending support for legacy APIs that effectively shuttered all third-party apps. Some of these measures appear to have been reversed since the launch of Threads. Musk bought Twitter in October 2022.
Threads has witnessed steady growth since its launch on July 5. Zuckerberg had earlier mentioned that the app hit 2 million users in the first two hours, 5 million in four hours and 10 million in seven hours. It rose to 30 million and 70 million in subsequent days.
Moneycontrol was the first to report on Meta's plans to launch a text-based app, then codenamed P92, in March 2023.
The app will also support ActivityPub, the decentralised social networking protocol powering services such as Mastodon and other federated apps, Moneycontrol wrote.
Threading along
While Threads is a standalone app, its growth was helped by the fact that it is linked to Instagram, which already has over 2 billion users. Users can log in with their Instagram handles and import the list of accounts they follow on the Meta-owned video and photo-sharing platform.
"Meta only needs roughly 1 in 4 Instagram users to use Threads monthly to make it as big as Twitter. It already has the scale, resources, and execution strategy to make that happen" said Jasmine Enberg, principal analyst at Insider Intelligence.
Twitter had clocked about 260 million monetisable daily active users (mDAU) as of November 2022. mDAU is Twitter's own metric that measures people who see ads and hence is not directly comparable to the user base of Threads.
That said, the rapid growth of Threads also appears to have shaken Musk, who has taken to Twitter in recent days to mock the app and Zuckerberg.
Twitter parent X Corp has also threatened to sue Meta, accusing the social media giant of engaging in "systematic, willful, and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter's trade secrets and other intellectual property”, according to a Semafor report.
In a letter to Zuckerberg, Twitter lawyer Alex Spiro alleged that Meta has hired dozens of former Twitter employees to develop Threads. Musk has laid off over 80 percent of Twitter's staff since he took over the company.
Meta, however, dismissed these claims. “No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee — that’s just not a thing,” Meta's communication director Andy Stone said on Threads.
Still a bare bones product
Instagram head Adam Mosseri also recently said in a Threads post that their goal was not to replace Twitter but instead "create a public square for communities on Instagram that never really embraced Twitter and for communities on Twitter that are interested in a less angry place for conversations".
That said, it is still early days for Threads and the service still lacks many prominent features such as direct messages, a chronological 'following-only' feed, and a fully functional web interface.
It also doesn't allow users to search for posts on the platform or enable them to delete Threads account without losing their Instagram account among others.
Mosseri however noted that many of these features are still in the works and will likely be rolled in the future.
Note: The story has been updated with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's statement.
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