Threads has set records for user growth since its launch Wednesday, with celebrities, politicians and other newsmakers joining the platform that analysts see as the first serious threat to the Elon Musk-owned microblogging app.
“This is mostly an organic request, and we haven’t run many promotions yet,” Zuckerberg said in a Threads post announcing the milestone.
The app’s race to 100 million users has been much faster than OpenAI-owned ChatGPT, which has become The fastest growing consumer app in history in January about two months after its launch, according to a study by UBS.
Twitter had roughly 240 million monetizable daily active users as of July last year, according to the company’s last public disclosure before Musk’s acquisition, though data from web analytics firms suggests usage has declined since then.
Twitter’s web traffic fell 11% from a year earlier in the days after Threads launched, compared to the 4% year-over-year decline from June, according to Similar.com.
Matthew Prince, CEO of internet infrastructure company Cloudflare, shared a graph showing a similar trajectory in a tweet Sunday and said Twitter traffic was “shrinking.”
Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the data.
While Threads isn’t the first attempt to challenge Twitter, other burgeoning competitors like Mastodon, Bluesky, Truth Social, and T2 all remain relatively small at this point.
Mastodon has about 7.7 million users in total, although less than 2 million of them actively use the service, according to the daily user statistics it provides.
Bluesky, a new service backed by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, has registered 265,000 users since launching an invite-only beta in February, and maintains a waiting list of about 2 million other users, according to a spokesperson.
Musk responded to the leads’ arrival by mocking him and threaten to sue Meta, alleging that the social media giant used its trade secrets and other confidential information to build the app.
this claim, legal experts sayit may be difficult to prove.
strings, Like the otherPotential competitors, bears Strong similarity to Twitter. It allows posts up to 500 characters in length and supports links, images and videos up to five minutes long.
The app also doesn’t have direct messaging functionality and lacks a desktop version that some users, such as business organizations, rely on.
It also currently lacks hashtags and keyword search functionality, which limits its appeal to advertisers and its usefulness as a place to catch up on real-time happenings as users frequently do on Twitter.
However, analysts said that the turmoil in Twitter, including sensation Recent restrictions on the number of tweets users can see can help attract threadshose sets.
Currently, there are no ads on the Thread app and Zuckerberg said the company will only consider monetization once there is a clear path to 1 billion users.
Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, said last week that Meta is not trying to replace Twitter and that the threads aim to focus on light topics like sports, music, fashion and design.
He acknowledged that politics and hard news would inevitably pop up on Topics, in what could be a challenge for the app set himself up as a “friendly” option for online public discourse.
Meta shares were up 0.7% on Monday and have gained more than 140% so far this year.
(Reporting by Katie Paul and Akash Sriram).
