Threads has reached a new user milestone, with Meta’s take on Twitter now up to 300 million monthly active users.
As per Instagram and Threads chief Adam Mosseri, the text-based app, designed as a replacement for Twitter, in order catch users migrating from X, has added more than 200 million additional users this year, as its growth momentum continues to ramp up.
As you can see in this chart, Threads has gained a lot more users recently, as its audience critical mass continues to attract more interest.
For further context, it took Threads 10 months to go from 100 million users to 200 million. It’s now risen to 300 million users in less than half that time.
Social platform growth compounds in this way, because as more people post, more people sign up to join in the expanded conversation. That momentum eventually flattens out once it reaches optimal scale, though based on these figures, Threads is not close to reaching that plateau as yet.
And at its current growth rate, Threads might actually catch X, which is currently sitting on 570 million monthly actives.
So right now, Threads is just over halfway there, but at these growth rates, it could exceed 500 million MAU early in the new year. It seems unlikely that Threads can keep adding an additional 100 million users every few months, but again, based on the current growth trends, it does seem plausible, at the least.
And with the latest download charts showing that Threads is still topping the iOS listings, clearly it’s holding broader interest.
As you’ll also note in Mosseri’s announcement, Threads has also shared its daily active user count for the first time, which its pegged at 100 million. For context, X has 250 million daily actives, a number that hasn’t budged for the app since November 2022.
So it does seem like Threads could catch that, though it is also interesting to note that the rate of daily versus monthly actives is lower on Threads (33%) than it is on X (44%).
Maybe Threads isn’t as sticky as it would like, and maybe that’s why the Threads team is currently conducting user surveys to get additional feedback about its algorithms and content restrictions.
There are definitely still some issues here, when assessing Threads versus X, particularly in regards to timeliness of content, and what gains traction on each. X, for example, was much better for staying up to date with news about the U.S. election in real time, with Threads’ aversion to politics limiting its value in this respect.
Maybe, if Threads can address this, based on what it’s audience wants, it might even be able to grow its momentum, though the Threads team would also be ruing the 25 million or so users that it may have lost to Bluesky.
Had Bluesky not gained traction in the wake of the election, Threads might have actually reached 300 million actives even faster, but again, the MAU/DAU split does suggest that the app has some issues to address in terms of audience retention and engagement.
But it’s also clearly tapped into a seam of audience demand. Many former Twitter users have settled on Threads as their replacement, even if it’s not a perfect simile, and I do think that Threads will become even more Twitter-like in the next few months.
Combine that with the Threads’ team’s almost constant updates (in the last week, Threads has updated the format of its link previews, and added new reaction icons to show when the Thread creator has engaged with a reply), and there’s a heap of potential there.
I know that some people are excited about Bluesky, and are less enthusiastic about Meta dominating social media with yet another platform. But I don’t see anyone beating it, and I do think that Threads will supersede X before June next year.
