Twitter's rival Threads reached 30 million signups in less than 24 hours, while ChatGPT took 60 days to have 30 million users, and almost any app in the past decade can't match this growth rate of Threads.
Users can easily sign up for Threads through their existing Instagram account and transfer followers from Instagram.
The day after its launch to the public on July 6, Meta's text-based social app Threads saw an explosion of users.
According to data released by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Threads reached 30 million signups in less than 24 hours of launch, while ChatGPT took 60 days to have 30 million users, and almost any app in the past decade can't match this growth rate of Threads. Just a few days ago, the US media was discussing the topic of social media that has become difficult.
The app, which has been described as "looks like Twitter", is a "raid" launched by Zuckerberg on Twitter. On July 6, local time, Twitter owner Elon Musk criticized Threads online, and Twitter's legal team threatened to take legal action against Threads, accusing Meta of participating in the "illegal theft" of its trade secrets in a letter.
Who is joining Threads?
The strong growth momentum continues. Zuckerberg revealed that as of the morning of July 7, local time, Threads has more than 70 million registrations, a number that "far exceeds our expectations." According to internal company data, users have posted more than 95 million posts and 190 million likes.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg constantly updates the number of Threads users online.
According to data provided to Time magazine by statistics agency Sensor Tower and data.ai, Threads is the most downloaded non-gaming app on launch days over the past decade. Sensor Tower said Threads had been downloaded about 40 million times worldwide on July 6. data.ai said Nintendo's Mario Kart Tour was the fastest-growing app of all time, with Threads ranking second, outpacing popular apps like Pokémon GO and Call of Duty Mobile Games, the .
According to data.ai, it took Instagram 15 months to reach 30 million downloads, while TikTok took less than two years to reach that milestone.
According to previous reports by The New York Times, two insiders revealed that ChatGPT had more than 30 million users two months after its launch, making it one of the fastest-growing software products ever recorded in memory. However, after the launch of the ChatGPT app in May, it was downloaded just under 18 million times.
The main attraction of Threads is that it is tied to the social app Instagram, and users can easily sign up through their existing Instagram account and move followers from Instagram. Jasmine Enberg, principal analyst at Insider Intelligence, said in a statement: "Meta only needs a quarter of Instagram users to use Threads every month, and it can be as big as Twitter. ”
In addition, a large number of celebrity accounts gained early access to Threads, including public figures such as Microsoft founder Bill Gates, singer Shakira and host Oprah Winfrey, as well as brands such as Netflix. According to Axios, as of the evening of July 6, local time, more than a quarter of the 535 members of the Senate and House of Representatives, as well as 6 Republican presidential candidates and senior White House aides have created Threads accounts.
Can Meta succeed this time?
Meta already has a strong social media infrastructure, including Facebook and Instagram, household names that put it in the lead. "Being associated with big brands is an advantage." Darrell West, a senior fellow at the Center for Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institution, told Time magazine that "Threads will not be a niche market player." ”
In addition, Threads has produced a nostalgic effect, with some users comparing the app's experience to earlier tweets.
The US Consumer News and Business Channel (CNBC) commented that while Twitter is known for being widely used by journalists, politicians and academics and is a place where news is often published, Threads may have a wider audience and attention because of its association with Instagram. In addition, Meta has taken steps to de-emphasize political content on Facebook, a policy that, if carried over to Threads, could separate it from Twitter.
"People won't use Threads to learn about news and global events as much as they do on Twitter, and the culture will be different. But it could be good for Meta: even the most active Twitter users are tired of constant confusion and temporary changes, and Threads can provide a great relief. Enberg wrote.
Tech blog The Split believes that the smartest thing Threads has done is to use a waterfall like TikTok, where users see not only the content of their followers, but also other recommendations on the platform.
However, the rapid growth alone will not be enough to make Threads an alternative to Twitter that will stand the test of time. It must demonstrate the ability to keep users engaged and coming back.
Kevin Driscoll, an assistant professor in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Virginia, said it remains to be seen whether Threads' success will last. "There are some problems with both Twitter and Facebook, and are specific to these highly centralized platforms, where the main focus is on growth, scale, and early user acquisition, so there's not much talk of long-term sustainability."
Threads still lacks some key features, such as search, hashtags, and follow streams. Meta is also blocked by a policy that requires users to delete their Instagram profile while trying to delete their Threads account. Andrew Bosworth, Meta's chief technology officer, said in a Threads post that the company is working to fix the issue.
Meta's launch of Threads in EU countries faces challenges due to regulatory concerns. The region is an important market for Meta. According to the Wall Street Journal, Europe accounted for about 22% of the company's $28 billion in advertising revenue in the first quarter of 2023.
Twitter's counterattack and Xiaoza's turnover
Zuckerberg hasn't shied away from lashing out at Twitter, saying in a post that Threads will "focus on good intentions," suggesting Twitter lacks that. "That's one of the reasons Twitter has never had the success I think it deserves, and we want to do it differently." He said.
Also known by many as a "Twitter killer," Threads poses a threat to Company X, which Musk founded earlier this year. Just hours after the launch of Threads, Company X's legal team wrote to Zuckerberg expressing "serious concerns about Meta's systematic, intentional and illegal misappropriation of Twitter's trade secrets and other intellectual property," Semafor reported. A Meta spokesperson responded: "None of the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee – that's not the same thing at all. ”
Musk criticized Threads in a series of tweets, calling it a "closed-source, algorithm-only system," suggesting that could mean "the manipulation of the information people see is essentially undetectable." In response to a tweet about Meta's dominance on social media, he wrote: "Any social media monopoly is desperate. ”
Notably, Instagram head Adam Mosseri said that Threads will not offer ActivityPub support when it launches. ActivityPub is a protocol for publishing information on a decentralized network. But Threads plans to allow interaction with other Fediverse servers in the future.
Federation Universe consists of a series of user-built or third-party hosted interconnected servers, each running independently, but the software running on these servers supports one or more communication protocols that follow open standards, so that the data of different servers can be interconnected. In other words, if both Twitter and Facebook join the Federation universe, users can use Twitter accounts to follow Facebook friends, interact, chat, and send files with them.
Threads' appearance is expected to give Zuckerberg a turnaround. Meta has not had a smooth run in recent years, with a series of high-profile scandals and missteps, including mass layoffs, with activists and regulators criticizing the company for failing to protect users from the platform and mishandling user data. The company's high-profile metaverse strategy launched in 2021 has also been slow to progress.
"This is a good start we were hoping for!" Zuckerberg posted on Threads, "It felt like the beginning of something special." ”