Threads turns one: where does the Twitter rival stand?

When Meta launched the social media platform Threads a year ago as a rival to X, formerly known as Twitter, it seemed like a perfect opportunity to capitalise on the chaos following Elon Musk's $44 billion takeover of the company in 2022. 

Marking the first anniversary, Meta said the platform has amassed 175 million active monthly users since it went live on 5 July last year. Yet despite this apparent success, Threads has struggled to become a meaningful cultural force comparable to Twitter and even its controversial successor, X.

Beneath the numbers

Threads was "but a twinkle in Mark Zuckerberg's eye" 18 months ago and arrived just as Musk "was taking a wrecking ball" to Twitter, said Alex Heath on The Verge. It has been growing steadily since its "huge launch", attracting 100 million monthly users by October 2023 – but monthly user numbers "only tell part of the growth story".

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How Threads usage compares to X is unclear. In April, Business Insider reported that Threads had reached 28 million daily users in the US to X's 22 million, based on analysis by data intelligence service Apptopia. But in July, another analysis by Sensor Tower found that users "are using it less frequently than other social media platforms", said the Financial Times, despite "promoting posts on sister app Instagram, which provides about two-thirds of its web traffic".

It is "telling" that Meta isn't sharing daily user numbers yet, as it does for Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, Heath said, with the omission suggesting "Threads is still getting a lot of flyby traffic from people who have yet to become regular users".

'Failed to convince'

It may sound like a lot, but 175 million monthly users is a "drop in the bucket" compared with Instagram's two billion monthly users or Facebook's more than three billion, wrote Taylor Lorenz in The Washington Post.

Crucially, Meta has "failed to convince" content creators to embrace Threads, said Lorenz. The "power" of these individuals "has made them darlings of corporate marketing crucial to the launch of new products" and Meta "knows better than most how influential creators can be". Content creators who spoke to the Post "said they are struggling to understand the platform". It "still seems like a platform in search of a mission", digital strategist Lia Haberman told the paper. That "lack of a distinct identity" could be seen from the most popular tags on the platform in the past year, all "related to generic lifestyle topics", wrote Lorenz.

Despite the "controversy" that surrounds TikTok and X, they also "give rise to news and trends that drive conversation", said Hope King on Axios. It is "not yet clear that 'friendly' conversation can create the same kind of spark". The platform is used mostly for text-based posts, Hope said, but whether that "drives the kind of engagement that the company can ultimately monetise is a big open question".