Threads, Meta Platforms’ Twitter competitor, surpassed 100 million sign-ups in five days, according to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, dethroning ChatGPT as the fastest-growing web platform to do so.
Threads has smashed user growth records since its debut on Wednesday, with celebrities, politicians, and other newsmakers flocking to the site, which experts regard as the first major challenge to Elon Musk’s microblogging service.
That’s mostly organic demand, and we haven’t even turned on many promotions yet,” Zuckerberg explained in a Threads post celebrating the achievement.
According to a UBS analysis, the app’s sprint to 100 million users was significantly faster than that of OpenAI-owned ChatGPT, which emerged as the fastest-growing consumer app in history in January, roughly two months after its inception.
According to the company’s latest public statement before Musk’s takeover, Twitter had almost 240 million monetizable daily active users as of July last year, however, evidence from web analytics companies shows usage has declined since then.
Threads Is Already Making Changes Amid Meta’s Twitter Fight
According to Similarweb, Twitter’s web traffic dropped 11% year over year in the days immediately following the Threads debut, compared to 4% year over year in June.
In a tweet on Sunday, Matthew Prince, CEO of internet infrastructure business Cloudflare, provided a graph showing a similar slope and stated that Twitter’s traffic was “tanking.
Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino said on Monday that the network experienced its “largest usage day” since February last week, but she didn’t elaborate. “There is only ONE Twitter,” she said on Twitter.
“I think we may set an all-time record this week,” Musk tweeted.
While Threads is not the first attempt to compete with Twitter, other developing competitors such as Mastodon, Bluesky, Truth Social, and T2 are still in their early stages.
According to daily user counts, Mastodon has roughly 7.7 million overall users, however, fewer than 2 million of them regularly utilize the site.
According to a spokeswoman, Bluesky, a new service sponsored by Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey, has signed up 265,000 customers since opening an invite-only test in February, and has a waitlist of about 2 million more.
Musk has mocked Threads’ launch and threatened to sue Meta, claiming that the social media titan utilized its trade secrets and other sensitive information to construct the app.
Legal experts think the allegation might be difficult to establish.
No desktop version and direct messaging option
Threads, like other potential competitors, has a striking similarity to Twitter. It permits submissions of up to 500 characters in length and supports links, images, and videos of up to 5 minutes in length.
The software also lacks a direct messaging option and a desktop version, both of which some users, such as commercial organisations, would rely on.
It presently lacks hashtags and keyword search tools, limiting its appeal to advertisers and usability as a platform for people to follow real-time events, as they do on Twitter.
There are now no advertisements on the Threads app, and Zuckerberg stated that the firm would consider monetization until there was a clear road to 1 billion users.
Last week, Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri stated that Meta was not intended to replace Twitter and that Threads will focus on lighter topics such as sports, music, fashion, and design.
He admitted that politics and harsh news will surely appear on Threads, posing a threat to the app’s positioning as the “friendly” alternative for online public dialogue.
Meta shares finished up 1.2% on Monday, bringing their year-to-date rise to more than 140%.