Meta’s Threads threatens Twitter’s turf with 30 million signups and no ads, yet

Forget the cage match between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. Zuck is stepping into the ring with Twitter instead.

Meta launched Threads, a “public conversations app” that looks an awful lot like Twitter, one day early on July 5. Zuckerberg boasted that the app gained 10 million users within seven hours of launching.

Threads is far from the first challenge to Twitter since Musk bought the company – remember Mastodon? – but one day in, it’s already leaps and bounds ahead of the rest.

The business behind the latest social craze

In less than one day, Zuckerberg said Threads processed more than 30 million sign-ups. But his target user number has a ‘B,’ not an ‘M.’

“It’ll take some time, but I think there should be a public conversations app with 1 billion+ people on it,” Zuckerberg wrote. “Twitter has had the opportunity to do this but hasn’t nailed it. Hopefully we will.”

Twitter, meanwhile, has roughly 400 million users worldwide.

Threads’ big leg up is its companion app, Instagram, which boasts more than 2 billion active monthly users. Instagram users can sign up for Threads using their existing Instagram account, keeping the same handle and verification status if they already have a blue checkmark.

When Facebook bought Instagram in 2012 for $1 billion, many questioned the costly move for an app that was barely off the ground. But it turned out to be one of Facebook’s best moves. Time will tell whether Threads becomes a serious competitor to Twitter.

Musk is less than impressed, laughing at a tweet that suggests Threads is a carbon copy of Twitter.

Ads: The bottom line

Twitter has been on shaky ground with advertisers since Elon Musk bought the company. Global ad revenue this year is estimated to be 28% lower than it was in 2022 at around $3 billion, according to research firm Insider Intelligence.

And an exclusive New York Times report citing internal documents said Twitter’s U.S. advertising for five weeks starting April 1 was $88 million, down 59% from a year earlier.

Meanwhile, Meta is looking at 40 times Twitter’s ad revenue for 2023 between Facebook and Instagram, at around $121.9 billion, Insider Intelligence reports. But don’t expect Threads to be inundated by ads anytime soon.

“Our approach will be the same as all our other products: make the product work well first, then see if we can get it on a clear path to 1 billion people, and only then think about monetization at that point,” Zuckerberg wrote in a Threads post.

Advertising experts said when that time comes, Meta has a clear advantage with built-in commercial relationships with its existing partners.

Meta’s own ad troubles

The company lost at least one advertiser this week. Canada’s government pulled ads from Meta over the company’s refusal to carry and pay for news content, a result of the country’s Online News Act.

Meta is facing another blow from the EU with a court ruling that threatens the company’s highly-lucrative practice of targeted ads.