Meta says that Threads now has more than 350 million monthly active users
But the question remains: who actually uses it?
Social media giant Meta reported its first-quarter earnings on Wednesday, and there was a lot to like: ad revenues increased 16% year over year; its AI data center plans are ramping up; and total revenue crushed expectations, hitting $42.3 billion.
But amid all of the big numbers, there was one comparatively needle-sized figure in the earnings call. CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed that Threads, Meta’s answer to Twitter/X, has now grown to over 350 million monthly active users, up some 30 million from the previous quarter — or, the equivalent of adding roughly the entire user base (~35 million) of rival Bluesky in just three months.
It seems that the text-first app is still growing almost two years after its debut, with Zuckerberg indicating on the call that Threads “continues to be on track to become our next major social app.” For some reason, though, it just doesn’t really feel that way.
Though we don’t have access to in-app traffic, looking at site visit data from Similarweb suggests that people seem to be driving clicks to Bluesky, the new microblogging platform on the block, much more than to the Instagram-linked service.
Bluesky rocketed in popularity during the US presidential election — owing to a mass exodus of users from X — with visits to the platform almost tripling in the month of November last year. Even since then, visits to Bluesky have gone up, climbing to ~73 million in March. Meanwhile, visits to threads.net have plateaued, having seen a much more modest uplift from November’s X-odus.
Now, if you’re wondering why a Meta-backed social media service has a “.net” domain, Threads has only just managed to secure “threads.com.” It officially changed the URL on April 24, after the messaging startup app that originally had the address was finally acquired by Shopify last June.
Common threads
So how does a platform that has 350 million active users per month only drive 28 million visits to its site?
One obvious answer is that, because it’s still so inextricably linked with Instagram, Threads users are even more app-based and therefore less likely to navigate to threads.net on a web browser. Another explanation is that the 350 million figure potentially includes a lot of people who might use Threads very lightly — clicking on one or two links via Instagram per month, with little intent on sharing Threads content more widely.
When Threads first launched in July 2023, it reported an instant surge of interest, hitting 10 million user signups in just seven hours, then 100 million in under five days — a milestone that took Facebook 4.5 years to reach.
But much of this momentum has come from Threads’ connection to Instagram, which reportedly has ~2 billion monthly active users. In order to sign up for Threads, you need an existing Instagram account; the direct message function on Threads redirects to Instagram DMs; and the microblogging app is plugged on Instagram feeds by showing users Threads posts from their followers and people of interest.
Accounts made through Instagram, then barely touched, are perhaps what’s giving Threads that “empty feeling,” and prompts the question of who actually uses it despite its strong user base. The challenge for Meta now is keeping those 350 million MAUs posting on the app — which it’s found some success in by creating spaces for particular topics of interest and communities, à la Reddit — and, beyond that, monetizing it. Last week, Meta announced in a blog post that all “eligible advertisers globally” will now be able to run ads on Threads.
X-ed out
Still, both Threads and Bluesky might struggle to outpace the original microblogging platform, X. Site visit data from Similarweb shows that X.com had 979 million site visits in March alone, almost 35x the amount of visits that threads.net saw that month.
Indeed, on the same day that Meta reported its Q1 earnings, X CEO Linda Yaccarino reported that the platform now has 600 million monthly active users globally, slightly up from the 570 million the company said it reached last September.
However, Meta’s approach with Threads thus far has been to address its goliath competition head-on. On Monday, an internal Meta planning deck was revealed in courts as part of the FTC’s ongoing antitrust trial against the company, which showed that employees initially pitched Threads as a better version of Twitter at a time when the social platform was experiencing “instability.” Now, Meta is stepping up efforts to directly wrangle users from X, testing a new feature that allows users to easily find the Threads accounts of the same creators they follow on X.
