Threads reaches 200 million users and continues to grow

Zach wasn’t lying about Threads’ growth momentum.

As Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during the company’s second quarter earnings call yesterday, Threads now has 200 million monthly active users, a number confirmed by Threads CEO Adam Mosseri today.

This means it took Threads a little over a year to reach this important milestone. Of course, many will ignore this as it’s just partnering with Instagram and piggybacking on that. But still, the profiles created and active users are very different, and the fact that Threads has 200 million monthly participants in the app is noteworthy in itself no matter how you look at it.

But what’s more noteworthy here, as Zuckerberg pointed out, is the momentum of growth.

That’s because, in addition to top-line usage figures, Threads’ growth rate has also increased significantly in recent weeks, based on usage data shared by Meta.

As you can see from this chart, Threads has actually been gaining growth momentum over time, according to the data the company has released: To be clear, Threads would have been growing steadily during the flat period shown here, but using Meta’s milestone numbers alone as a guide, we can see that Threads gained more users last month than it had in the three months prior.

In summary, threads It aimed to hit 100 million active users in October 2023, and by February of this year, seven months after its release, the number had risen to 130 million users, then hit 150 million in April, and early last month it reported it had hit 175 million users.

On average, Threads was adding 7.5 million new users per day. Between October 2023 and February of this year, the number of monthly active users exceeded 1 million, and then through July, the number of monthly active users increased by 9 million.

But according to these figures, Threads’ MAUs have increased by 25 million in the past four weeks, meaning that Threads’ growth momentum has nearly tripled in July, a very positive sign for the app’s future potential.

So what is driving this growth?

Well, I think part of it is due to the US elections, because despite Meta’s aversion to politics, many are still discussing major events such as the switch from Biden to Harris in the 2024 election campaign.

The change sparked a new level of fierce criticism from right-wing critics, who are now increasingly turning their attention to X. The assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump (July 13) also prompted major changes to the app, with owner Elon Musk saying: Public support for Trump As the next commander in chief.

This may have driven more people away from X and towards Threads instead. The Olympics also sparked renewed interest in the real-time discussions that are on the rise on Threads.

And perhaps we will see Threads gain even more traction as interest grows with more commenters posting to Threads instead, and as the venue of choice for discussion continues to shift.

The threefold growth is remarkable, and it will be interesting to watch Threads reach the 250 million MAU mark as an indicator of growing interest.

or not.

To be clear, Threads’ user base is still quite far from X’s, which has 250M daily active users and 500M monthly participants. So Threads currently has about 40% of X’s users, but that’s still a significant number and again, momentum is the more important metric at this stage.

The tide is turning in Threads’ favor, and the platform’s continued addition of features for discovering trending topics may just add more fuel to the fire.

Again, we won’t know for sure until Threads hits its next usage milestone, but if that happens within the next few months, you can bet Elon and co. will be publishing new “active users nanoseconds” type stats showing that X still has a big lead.

But if momentum picks up, we’ll start to see clear signs that Threads is becoming the hotspot for a large portion of real-time social media users — wherever the conversation is happening, people are going to be there — and there are signs that Threads now has a real opportunity to capture a much larger share of online attention.