PYMNTS MonitorEdge May 2024

Threads Gains 175 Million Users in First Year

About a year after its launch, Threads has topped 175 million monthly active users.

“Threads now has more than 175M monthly actives. What a year,” Meta Founder, Chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a Wednesday (July 3) post on the text-based social media platform.

Built by Meta’s Instagram team, Threads was launched on July 5, 2023, in more than 100 countries. The company said at the time that the app offers a space to share posts that are up to 500 characters long and include links, photos and videos up to five minutes long.

“Our vision with Threads is to take what Instagram does best and expand that to text, creating a positive and creative space to express your ideas,” Meta said in a press release announcing the launch. “Just like on Instagram, with Threads you can follow and connect with friends and creators who share your interests — including the people you follow on Instagram and beyond.”

After the app garnered 10 million sign-ups in the first seven hours after its debut, Zuckerberg said he envisioned a much higher number that would surpass the 300 million-plus users Twitter (now X) had at the time.

“There should be a public conversations app with 1 billion-plus people on it,” he said. “Twitter has had the opportunity to do this but hasn’t nailed it. Hopefully we will.”

In April, Zuckerberg said during Meta’s quarterly earnings call that Threads had more than 150 million monthly active users and was “growing well.”

“There are now more than 150 million monthly actives, and it continues to generally be on the trajectory I hoped to see,” Zuckerberg said.

“My daughters would want me to mention that Taylor Swift is now on Threads — that was a big deal in my house,” he added.

Meta Chief Financial Officer Susan Li said later in the call that Threads “continues to see good traction as we continue to ship valuable features and scale the community.”

In May, Threads began testing a “pinned columns” feature on its web application that allows users to pin as many as 100 feeds to their home page so that they can easily jump to those from people they follow, those recommended by the Threads algorithm, or those based on keywords or topics they have specified.