In Meta’s Q1 2024 earnings call, Mark Zuckerberg pointed out that “Threads is growing well… There are now more than 150M monthly actives, and it continues to generally be on the trajectory I hoped to see.” Threads is Meta’s text-based conversation app launched on 5th July 2023 that entered into a competitive market that includes X, Mastodon and BlueSky. Despite the competitive market and the years-long prevalence of text-based communication apps and websites, Threads has been getting on well.
A week and a half after Threads’ launch, we wrote about the app’s remarkable success in having acquired 30 million users in 24 hours, and the characteristics of the tech industry that didn’t necessarily require innovation to attain success, but the ability to execute. It also helped that Threads’ parent company Meta could leverage its 2 billion-strong userbase from Instagram. A year on from the app’s launch, how do things looks for Threads’ growth?
Threads’ largest competitor is X (formerly Twitter), and if industry talk is anything to go by, things aren’t looking too rosy. Despite reports of millions of users leaving the app and revenues plummeting, its clear to anyone using X for even a short period of time to see how toxic it is. Hateful content, bots, AI-generated replies and inconsistent implementation of disciplinary measures are turning people off. And then there’s Elon Musk, a controversial figure who appears increasingly unhinged and whose leadership of X has been widely criticised.
It seems, therefore, that Threads doesn’t have to do much to win the short-form, text-based app war. Keep growing and don’t screw it up. When Threads first launched, there was a great deal of hype (and a hilarious temper tantrum by Musk), but the hype soon died down. Would Threads be a one-hit wonder? For many, that was the feeling. They went on Threads, posted once or twice, realised it wasn’t anything particularly special and never used it again. But Meta has a solid history of building apps with staying power. Take Facebook, which is widely regarded as dead, but continues to be the largest social media platform in the world with over 3 billion monthly active users.
And it’s worth remembering, for apps in this day and age, it’s not necessarily the features that makes it special. An app’s uniqueness is largely determined by its community. Featured are regularly cloned by competitors, and so the USP of a social app is the community. X’s community isn’t exactly something to write home about, despite small niches that serve as the exception rather than the rule. Meta’s focus really needs to be on creating an alternative community to X, which is regularly referred to as a ‘hell-site’. And if X doesn’t do anything to make things better, perhaps we could be headed for a Digg & Reddit-style exodus. Could there soon be a Quit X Day upon us, similar to Quit Digg Day that occurred on 30th August 2010?
Meta has always been about growth. From the early days of Facebook, Zuckerberg created a culture that required ‘moving fast and breaking things’. This often led the company into hot water, with various privacy-related scandals. But Meta’s apps, whether home-grown or acquired, have managed to fare very well. Back in February 2022, Facebook’s user growth was negative for the first time in its history. Tech journalism was quick to jump onto the bandwagon that Meta was finished. According to many at the time, it would soon be a precipitous fall into obscurity. However since then, the company’s share price has more than doubled and on 5th April 2024, it achieved a historic value of $527.34 per share.
Not all of Meta’s projects work out. Remember Facebook dating? Or how about Camera, an app that was curiously launched as a competitor to the newly acquired Instagram? But a variety of Meta’s apps such as Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram have incredible staying power. Zuckerberg stated in Meta’s Q1 2024 earnings call that Threads “continues to see good traction as we continue to ship valuable features and scale the community.” And so, as long as X continues to burn and Meta doesn’t do anything stupid, Threads could be around for a while.
