Meta’s Threads could reach 1 billion users, Zuckerberg says

Meta’s new Twitter-like microblogging app Threads could hit 1 billion users, the social media giant’s founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Wednesday, as reported by The Verge.

When asked about the rising app during the company’s second quarter earnings call with investors, Zuckerberg called it “a weird anomaly in the tech industry that there hasn’t been an app like this for text-based convos that has reached 1 billion people.”

Launched earlier this month, Meta’s Threads app managed to surpass 100 million sign-ups within its first week, making it the fastest growing app ever. According to app analytics company data.ai, Threads now has one-fifth of Twitter’s weekly user base. Although the microblogging app’s momentum started to slow down after a while, Zuckerberg announced last week that it’s still being used by ‘’tens of millions’’ of users on a daily basis.

Also Read: Threads User and Revenue Statistics

During the earnings call, Zuckerberg said that in addition to incorporating essential features that are missing currently, their primary focus is also to improve Threads’ retention rate. “I’m highly confident we’re going to be able to pour enough gasoline on this to help it grow after that work is done,’’ he said.

“We’ve tried a bunch of standalone experiences over time, and in general, we haven’t had a lot of success with standalone apps,” he added. “A part of me wonders if this is just a classic venture capital portfolio question, where you try a bunch of things and a bunch of them don’t work, and once in a while, one hits… it could be that this is such an idiocratic case because of all the factors happening around Twitter, or X as it’s called now.”

Also Read: Twitter changes its logo to ‘X’

While Elon Musk’s Twitter (or ‘X’ now) continues its efforts to lure back advertisers who left the platform after the $44 billion acquisition was completed in October, Meta currently doesn’t have any plans to introduce ads on Threads, at least until it surpasses ‘’hundreds of millions’’ of users.

“I think we’re really just focused on taking this opportunity, which is an awesome one that we didn’t expect at this scale,’’ Zuckerberg said during the call. ‘’It’s going to be a long road ahead.”

Meta’s Q2 2023 results

For the second quarter of 2023, Meta reported a revenue of $32.0 billion, up 11% year-over-year. The number of its daily active users hit 2.06 billion and monthly active users reached 3.03 billion, both up 5% and 3% respectively. Find out more Meta usage and revenue statistics.