Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg holds a smartphone, as he makes a keynote speech at the Meta Connect annual event, at the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California, U.S. September 25, 2024.
Manuel Orbegozo | Reuters
Threads, Meta‘s rival to Elon Musk’s X app, now has nearly 275 million monthly users, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Wednesday.
“We continue to be on track towards this becoming our next major social app,” Zuckerberg said on a call with analysts, adding that he was “quite pleased” with the trajectory of the app.
The latest numbers indicate Threads is up 175% from a year ago when it reached 100 million users. The app is also up from 200 million monthly actives since Meta’s second-quarter report in July. The app is now signing up more than 1 million users per day, Zuckerberg also said on Wednesday.
Threads launched in July 2023 as a rival to Musk-owned X, who closed a deal to purchase the social app formerly known as Twitter in October 2022 for $44 billion.
X remains ahead of Threads in terms of users, with research firm Sensor Tower estimating in March that the app had 550 million monthly users. However, X’s U.S. user base was down 23% since Musk completed his purchase of the company in October 2023.
Threads could provide Meta more places to deliver ads to users. Ads accounted for 98.3% of Meta’s total revenue in the third quarter.
“Specifically, as it pertains to monetization, we don’t expect Threads to be a meaningful driver of 2025 revenue at this time,” said CFO Susan Li on the earnings call. “We’ve been just pleased with the growth trajectory and again, are really focused on introducing features that the community finds valuable.”
Analysts at Bernstein wrote on Wednesday that Threads’ growth provides a lot to get excited about.
“Even though Meta does not expect Threads to be a meaningful driver of 2025 revenue, we expect ads to show up and scale on Threads next year,” the Bernstein analysts wrote.
Across Meta’s family of apps, which includes Facebook, Instagram and its other consumer-facing platforms, the company said its daily active people grew 5% year-over-year to reach 3.29 billion. That figure came in below analysts’ expectations of 3.31 billion.
Meta shares were down roughly 4% on Thursday.
“We’re very focused on continuing to build out the sort of functionality of Threads over time and being responsive to what users tell us that they’re interested in,” Li said.
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