Mark Zuckerberg says Twitter-rival Threads? daily users ahead of expectations, reveals future plans

Ever since its launch on July 6, Meta’s Instagram-powered Twitter-rival app Threads has been hitting big milestones. Just five days after its launch, it surpassed the massive 100 million registered users on the platform, becoming the fastest consumer application to reach this milestone and beating OpenAI’s ChatGPT’s record of 2 months. And now, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has highlighted that the users are actively using the platform weeks after the launch.

A few hours ago, Zuckerberg posted on Threads and said, “I’m very optimistic about how the Threads community is coming together. Early growth was off the charts, but more importantly, 10s of millions of people now come back daily. That’s way ahead of what we expected”.

He also revealed what the company plans to do with the platform for the rest of the year as well as the years to come. “The focus for the rest of the year is improving the basics and retention. It’ll take time to stabilize, but once we nail that then we’ll focus on growing the community. We’ve run this playbook many times (FB, IG, Stories, Reels, etc) and I’m confident Threads is on a good path too” he added.

Twitter is taking its rival seriously

While there is no way to verify the daily user statistics on Threads, Twitter, its biggest rival, is not taking it lightly. Right after Threads’ launch, Twitter executive chair Elon Musk posted a series of tweets taking digs at Threads, Zuckerberg, and Instagram. It was also reported that Meta was threatened to be sued by Twitter.

The very next week, after Threads crossed the 100 million mark, both Musk and CEO Linda Yaccarino tweeted how Twitter’s “user-seconds” were the highest since February and were primed to make a new all-time record soon.

In fact, Twitter also began sharing its ad revenue with its verified content creators, giving them a slice of their own pie for the first time since the creation of the platform. Although the announcement itself was made on June 10, much before Threads’ launch, whether the move was precautionary in nature cannot be said.

Back then, Musk had tweeted, explaining how the ad revenue was calculated and the total amount to be disbursed, “In a few weeks, X/Twitter will start paying creators for ads served in their replies. First block payment totals $5M. Note, the creator must be verified and only ads served to verified users count”.

While it is not exactly a ‘hail Mary’ move on Twitter’s behalf, it does highlight that the people behind the platform are taking the threat of Threads taking away a part of their user base seriously. While it cannot be said about the platforms, with the incentives being thrown, users are definitely going to come out as the winners.