Meta’s founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg has disclosed that the company’s latest social media app launched a year ago, Threads, now has over 175 million active monthly users.
Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp launched Threads on July 5 last year to challenge Elon Musk’s X, formerly known as Twitter.
The app garnered 100 million users in less than a week after launch partly because of an easy way for users of the popular platform Instagram to set up their Threads profiles, but some early users subsequently dropped off.
Announcing the app’s feat on Wednesday, Zuckerberg via a post on the platform wrote: “Threads now has more than 175M monthly actives. What a year.”
Back in April, Zuckerberg revealed that Threads had more than 150 million monthly active users, up from the 130 million reported in February.
X is still ahead
Despite the growth achieved by Meta’s Threads in one year, it is still far behind X in terms of active users. In May, Elon Musk announced that X had 600 million monthly active users, about half of which use the platform every day.
However, the figure may also include bots and automated accounts, which Musk has been trying to get rid of since he took over Twitter, without success.
Meanwhile, further insights released by Meta show that most people are going to Threads for text rather than images, noting that 63% of all Threads posts are text-only.
The company added that more than 50 million Tags have been created, with the top three being PhotographyThreads, BookThreads and GymThreads.
What you should know
While Threads may have recorded an impressive growth based on the monthly data released, the data paints a limited picture of the app’s popularity of Threads, key metrics such as the daily active user count, and average time spent per user are not released yet.
- Also, Threads’ success could be attributed to its integration with Instagram and consistent promotion on Instagram and Facebook.
- When the app was launched last year, it attracted at least 10 million sign-ups within just seven hours of its launch. According to Meta’s spokesperson, top celebrities that were among the first set of people to sign up include Jennifer Lopez, Shakira, Gordon Ramsay, Tom Brady and Coldplay.
- Back then, Zuckerberg said in a post on the new platform that he hoped to see the Threads community grow to over one billion members.
- He also took to Twitter for what appeared to be his first post in over a decade, sharing a popular Spider-Man meme in what appeared to be a nod to Threads’ similarities with Twitter.