Meta’s Twitter rival Threads crossed 100 million sign-ups within five days of launch, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Monday, dethroning ChatGPT as the fastest-growing online platform to hit the milestone.
Threads have been setting records for user growth since its launch on Wednesday, with celebrities, politicians and other newsmakers joining the platform seen by analysts as the first serious threat to the Elon Musk-owned social media app.
“That’s mostly organic demand, and we haven’t even turned on many promotions yet,” Zuckerberg said in a Threads post announcing the milestone.
The app’s sprint to 100 million users was much faster than that of OpenAI-owned ChatGPT, which became the fastest-growing consumer application in history in January about two months after its launch, according to a UBS study.
Still, Threads has some catching up to do.
Twitter had nearly 240 million monetizable daily active users as of July last year, according to the company’s last public disclosure before Musk’s takeover.
Twitter has responded to the arrival of threads by threatening to sue Meta Platforms, alleging that the social media behemoth used its trade secrets and other confidential information to build the app.
That claim, legal experts say, could be hard to prove. Threads bears a strong resemblance to Twitter, as do numerous other social media sites that have cropped up in recent months as users have chafed at Musk’s management of the service.
Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has launched a text-based social media platform meant to compete with Twitter called Threads. It has already garnered millions of users on its first day but many critics say it still has many of the same drawbacks of other social media platforms.
No DMs, no desktop version
Threads allows posts that are up to 500 characters long and supports links, photos and videos of up to five minutes. The app also does not yet have a direct messaging function and lacks a desktop version that certain users, such as business organizations, rely on.
It also currently lacks hashtags and keyword search functions, which limits both its appeal to advertisers and its utility as a place for following real-time events like users frequently do on Twitter.
Still, analysts said the turmoil at Twitter, including recently imposed limits on the number on tweets users can see, could help threads to attract users and advertisers.
Currently, there are no ads on the Threads app and Zuckerberg said the company would only think about monetization once there was a clear path to one billion users.
Instagram head Adam Mosseri said last week Meta was not trying to replace Twitter and that Threads aimed to focus on light subjects like sports, music, fashion and design. He acknowledged that politics and hard news are inevitably going to show up on Threads, in what would be a challenge for the app pitching itself as the “friendly” option for public discourse online.
The Current19:54Twitter, Threads and the fragmentation of social media
Facebook’s parent company Meta has launched Threads, a new app pitched as a friendly alternative to Twitter. Guest host Robyn Bresnahan talks to two experts about the increasing fragmentation of social media, and the consequences of losing platforms once viewed as the internet’s “public square.”
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