Recently, my Localogy colleague Mike Boland and I recorded a soon-to-be-published episode of This Week in Local. On it, we riff on Threads. Something we hadn’t considered recently. If we ever had.
How is Meta’s Threads doing in its quest to unseat X (nee Twitter) as the leading text-based social media platform?
If you ask Mark Zuckerberg, the answer is probably “fantastic.” Which he would say while staring blankly into nothingness. Without blinking. For the record, Zuckerberg did say that the app is “growing well” on Meta’s latest earnings call.
The Threads Thread
As you may recall, Threads got off to a roaring start when it clocked an impressive 30 million downloads in the first 24 hours of the app’s availability in July of last year. It surpassed 100 million in five days.
Quick fun fact. Threads is more than just a year old. The app was originally launched in October 2019 and taken down in 2021. At the time it was more of a Snapchat than a Twitter clone. The current version dates back to November 2022 and was supposed to be a feature on Instagram. The app as its own text-based thing then emerged in July 2023.
The context at the time was that about a year earlier Elon Musk had acquired Twitter. And to many, the misanthropic, impulsive (and brilliant) Musk was just the wrong person to own an important platform like Twitter. Musk renamed Twitter X on July 23 last year. This was widely considered one of history’s sloppiest rebrandings.
It was in this environment of angst over Musk’s stewardship over Twitter that so many seemed ready to embrace an alternative. So the timing seemed pretty good to roll out Threads.
Yet despite the dramatic launch, Threads hasn’t made a huge mark on the social media landscape. At Localogy’s recent L24 conference in Texas, I moderated a highly engaging panel of social media experts. Each of them was ready to talk candidly about anything I asked. I just plain forgot to ask about Threads. And no one brought it up.
Threads is more than a blip on the radar. But perhaps not much more. It has about 150 million monthly active users. This number feels smaller when you realize that X has 550 million MAUs. And they all pale next to Instagram’s 2 billion. Instagram is owned by Meta, as is Threads. And Insta and Threads have been joined at the hip by Meta so joining the app is essentially as easy as joining Instagram, among other reasons.
Cage Match
While Threads hasn’t exactly knocked X out, its presence annoys Musk. Remember the ultimate tech bro cage fight that never happened?
What got me thinking about this was something I read last week about how the platform is experimenting with an incentive program to pay Instagram creators to scooch on over to Threads and create there. And bring their followers with them.
Social platforms have to get creative to generate enough content to be relevant. We get it. They have to make creation safe and easy. And the best creators need to see a path to earnings.
But having to pay creators to kick the tires doesn’t exactly scream “We’re crushing it” either.
