Meta Threads Surpasses 175 Million Users in One Year

Just a year and a half ago, Threads was nothing more than a twinkle in Mark Zuckerberg’s eye.

Now Elon Musk’s X competitor has more than 175 million monthly active users, Meta CEO says announce On Wednesday.

As with all social networks, and especially for Threads, monthly users only tell part of the growth story. It’s significant that Meta, unlike Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram, has yet to share its daily user numbers. This omission suggests that Threads still gets a lot of fly-by traffic from people who haven’t yet become regular users.

In recent months, we’ve heard from Meta staff that the app’s growth still comes from promoting it internally on Instagram. Both apps share the same account system, and that’s not expected to change.

Still, 175 million monthly users for a one-year-old app isn’t exactly something to frown upon, especially given Meta’s lack of a track record of experimenting with standalone apps for years. Zuckerberg has been open to me and others that he thinks Threads has the potential to be the company’s next billion-user app. I’ve heard that Meta is focusing on markets where it thinks it has a chance to capture more market share from X, such as Japan, to continue its growth story.

For now, Threads is still Meta’s financial loss leader, but it certainly has the wherewithal to fund itself indefinitely. Internally, I’ve heard that executives are considering running ads on Threads sometime next year, but the exact plans are still unclear. It’s easy to see how Threads could plug into Instagram’s existing ad system. And given Meta’s deliberate decision to deprioritize politics and promote light content, it could be an attractive destination for advertisers looking for a brand-safe alternative to X.

“I would love for it to be really, really big, but I’m actually more interested in whether it’s culturally relevant and has hundreds of millions of users,” Instagram’s Adam Mosseri told me when Threads first launched. A year later, the app has certainly made more headway on the cultural front. But the fact that it’s still growing means Meta has a long way to go to make it happen.