More than 100 million users have joined Meta’s new Threads platform, making it the fastest-growing online platform in history.
The app, which was set up as a direct competitor to Twitter, achieved the feat in less than five days, beating ChatGPT’s rise earlier this year. It took the popular chatbot from OpenAI two months to reach 100 million monthly active users back in January. By Tuesday afternoon, however, Quiver Quantative, an alternative data platform had tracked over 104 million Threads users using the Threads account numbers shown on Instagram pages.
Threads is a text-based conversation app, like Twitter, yet for the time being, it is mobile only. There are also some other key differences. Notably, the app follows an algorithmic feed similar to Facebook and Instagram, in contrast to Twitter’s chronological timeline, which displays posts from newest to oldest in real-time. Posts displayed on Threads’ algorithmic timeline also are not limited to the accounts the user follows. The app plans to steer away from encouraging hard news or political content, a stance Facebook has been taking in recent years.
“Threads reached 100 million sign ups over the weekend. That’s mostly organic demand and we haven’t even turned on many promotions yet. Can’t believe it’s only been 5 days!” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a post Monday.
Meanwhile, Similarweb, a data company that specializes in web analytics, reported that web traffic to Twitter was down 5% for the first two full days Threads was generally available compared with the previous week. The company said Twitter’s web traffic is down 11% compared with the same days in 2022
