Meta Reports 70 Million Threads Sign-ups in First 2 Days
BY PYMNTS | JULY 7, 2023
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Meta reported that its new Threads app gained 70 million sign-ups in its first two days.
“70 million sign-ups on Threads as of this morning,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a Friday (July 7) post on the new social media platform. “Way beyond our expectations.”
Zuckerberg said in earlier posts that the text-based app gained 2 million sign-ups in its first two hours, 5 million in its first four hours and 10 million in its first seven hours.
At the same time, competitor Twitter was experiencing outages on its desktop app and to a lesser extent on its mobile app, CNBC reported Friday, citing data from the Downdetector website.
Threads launched Wednesday (July 5) in more than 100 countries and in iOS and Android versions.
The new text-based app was built by Meta’s Instagram teams and offers a space to share posts that are up to 500 characters long and include links, photos and videos up to five minutes long.
“Our vision with Threads is to take what Instagram does best and expand that to text, creating a positive and creative space to express your ideas,” Meta said when announcing the launch.
The app is not offered in the European Union, however, due to uncertainty surrounding the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and data privacy concerns.
Graham Doyle, deputy commissioner of Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC), said that Meta “informed us that they have no plans” to launch the app in the EU “at present,” Bloomberg reported Wednesday.
Zuckerberg said Thursday (July 6) that he aims to see Threads surpass Twitter’s 300 million-plus user count.
“There should be a public conversations app with 1 billion-plus people on it,” the Meta CEO said on the new social media platform. “Twitter has had the opportunity to do this but hasn’t nailed it. Hopefully we will.”
For its part, Twitter greeted the launch of Threads with a letter from its lawyer to Meta that accused the company of misappropriating trade secrets, alleged that Threads was built by former Twitter employees who were assigned to copy the social media app, and warned Meta not to scrape Twitter user data.
