Meta Platforms’ Twitter rival Threads surpassed 100 million subscriptions within five days of launch, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Monday, dethroning ChatGPT as the fastest-growing online platform to reach the milestone.
Threads has been setting user growth records since its launch on Wednesday, with analysts considering the flocking to the platform by celebrities, politicians and other newsmakers as the first serious threat to the Elon Musk-owned microblogging app.
“That’s mostly organic demand, and we haven’t activated many promotions yet,” Zuckerberg said in a Threads post announcing the milestone.
The app’s sprint to 100 million users was much faster than that of OpenAI-owned ChatGPT, which became the fastest-growing consumer app ever in January, about two months after launch, according to a UBS study.
Still, Threads has some catching up to do. Twitter had nearly 240 million monetizable daily active users as of July last year, according to the company’s last public disclosure before the Musk acquisition.
Twitter responded to Threads’ arrival by threatening to sue Meta, alleging that the social media giant used its trade secrets and other sensitive information to build the app.
That claim, legal experts say, could be hard to prove.
Threads bears a strong resemblance to Twitter, like many other social networking sites that have sprung up in recent months as users have chafed at Musk’s management of the service. It allows posts of up to 500 characters and supports links, photos, and videos of up to 5 minutes.
The app does not yet have a direct messaging feature and lacks a desktop version that is trusted by certain users, such as business organizations.
It also currently lacks hashtags and keyword search features, limiting both its appeal to advertisers and its usefulness as a place to follow events in real time as users frequently do on Twitter.
Still, analysts said the turmoil on Twitter, including recently imposed limits on the number of tweets users can see, could help Threads attract users and advertisers.
Currently, there are no ads in the Threads app, and Zuckerberg said the company would only think about monetization once there was a clear path to 1 billion users.
Instagram boss Adam Mosseri said last week that Meta was not trying to replace Twitter and that Threads was aiming to focus on light topics like sports, music, fashion and design.
He acknowledged that politics and hard news will inevitably appear on Threads, in what would be a challenge for the app to present itself as the “friendly” option for public discourse online.
© Thomson Reuters 2023
