Meta’s Threads Is Now The Fastest Growing Platform After 100M Users Sign Up In The First Five Days

Meta’s Twitter rival Threads passed the 100 million sign-up mark within five days of its launch, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Monday, dethroning ChatGPT as the fastest-growing online platform to hit the milestone.

Threads has set records for user growth since its launch on Wednesday, with celebrities, politicians and other newsmakers joining the platform, seen by analysts as the first serious threat to Elon Musk’s social media app.

“That’s mostly organic demand, and we haven’t even triggered many promotions yet,” Zuckerberg said in a Threads post announcing the milestone.

The app’s sprint to 100 million users was much faster than that of OpenAI-owned ChatGPT, which became the fastest-growing consumer application in history in January about two months after its launch, according to a UBS study.

Still, Threads has some catching up to do.

Twitter had nearly 240 million daily monetizable active users as of last July, according to the company’s last public disclosure before the Musk acquisition.

Twitter has responded to the arrival of threads by threatening to sue Meta Platforms, alleging that the social media giant used its trade secrets and other confidential information to build the app.

That claim, legal experts say, may be difficult to prove. Threads bears a strong resemblance to Twitter, as do numerous other social media sites that have sprung up in recent months as users have become irked by Musk’s management of the service.

No DMs, no desktop version

Threads allows posts up to 500 characters long and supports links, photos, and videos up to five minutes long. The app also does not yet have a direct messaging feature and lacks a desktop version that certain users, such as corporate organizations, rely on.

It also currently lacks hashtags and keyword search features, which limits both its appeal to advertisers and its usefulness as a place to track real-time events, as users often do on Twitter.

Still, analysts said the turmoil on Twitter, including recently imposed limits on the number of tweets users can see, could help Threads attract users and advertisers.

Currently, there are no ads in the Threads app, and Zuckerberg said the company wouldn’t think about monetization until there was a clear path to a billion users.

Instagram head Adam Mosseri said last week that Meta isn’t trying to replace Twitter and that Threads focuses on light topics like sports, music, fashion and design. He acknowledged that political and hard news will inevitably appear on Threads, which would challenge the app to present itself as the “friendly” option for online public discussions.