Mark Zuckerberg Announces Surpassing of Threads’ Daily User Expectations and Unveils Future Plans
Meta’s Threads app, which competes with Twitter and is powered by Instagram, has achieved significant milestones since its release on July 6. Within just five days, it surpassed 100 million registered users, making it the quickest consumer app to reach this milestone. This achievement outpaced OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which took two months to achieve the same feat. Furthermore, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has emphasized that users continue to actively engage with the platform weeks after its launch.
A few hours ago, Zuckerberg posted on Threads saying, “I’m very optimistic about how the Threads community is coming together. Early growth was off the charts, but most importantly, 10 million people are now coming back daily. That’s way ahead of what we expected.”
He also revealed what the company plans to do with the platform for the rest of the year and in the coming years. “The focus of the end of the year is on improving and preserving the basics. It will take time to stabilize, but once we do, we will focus on growing the community. We’ve used this playbook many times (FB, IG, Stories, Reels, etc.) and I’m sure Threads is on the right track as well,” he added.
Twitter takes its competitors seriously
Although Threads’ daily user statistics cannot be verified, Twitter, its biggest competitor, does not take it lightly. Immediately after the launch of Threads, Twitter CEO Elon Musk posted a series of tweets reflecting on Threads, Zuckerberg and Instagram. It has also been reported that Twitter threatened to sue Meta.
The very next week, after Threads crossed the 100 million mark, both Musk and CEO Linda Yaccarino tweeted how Twitter’s “user seconds” were the highest since February and were set to set another all-time high soon.
In fact, Twitter also started sharing ad revenue with its verified content creators, giving them a slice of their own pie for the first time since the platform was created. Although the announcement itself was made on June 10th, well before the release of Threads, it is impossible to say whether the change was precautionary in nature.
At the time, Musk had tweeted how the ad revenue was calculated and the total amount to be paid: “In a few weeks, X/Twitter will start paying content creators based on the ads shown in responses. The first block payment will total $5 million. Please note that the content creator must be verified and only ads shown to verified users will be counted .”
While it’s not a “hail Mary” move on Twitter’s behalf, it does highlight that the people behind the platform are taking seriously the threat of Threads taking away some of their user base. While the platforms can’t be said for sure, users are sure to be winners when the incentives are thrown in.
