Instagram’s Threads Hits 100M Users to Become Fastest-Growing App Ever
Instagram’s Threads app has hit 100 million users barely a week since its launch — making Meta’s Twitter rival app easily the fastest growing app ever.
According to Quiver Quantitative’s Threads Tracker, which uses data taken from Instagram users’ profiles, Meta’s Twitter competitor reached the milestone of 100 million active users this morning.
Threads was released on June 5. On the first day of its launch, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg noted that the app had attracted two million sign-ups in two hours, five million sign-ups in four hours, and 10 million registered users in seven hours.
The next morning, Zuckerberg announced that over 30 million people had signed up to try the new app and said that the growth was “way beyond our expectations.”
The Fastest-Growing App Ever
Until Threads’ success, OpenAI’s ChatGPT had been the fastest-growing app — achieving 10 million daily users in 40 days and 100 million monthly users in around two months.
According to the The Verge, users are not just signing up to Threads, they are posting too. On Thursday, it was reported that there had already been more than 95 million posts and 190 million likes shared on the app.
The rate of user adoption on Threads has been unprecedented despite the sign-up to the app being currently limited to iOS and Android with no web-accessible version.
The app is also missing basic features that many users looking for a Twitter alternative would normally view as essential. For example, search on Threads is currently limited to usernames, there is no hashtag support, and the app does not yet have a chronological feed of posts.
Twitter’s Traffic is ‘Tanking’
While Threads may still be in its infancy, its meteoric rise in users within a matter of days shows that the app may have the potential to unseat Twitter in the text-based social media space.
Twitter had 229 million monthly active users in May 2022, according to a statement made before Elon Musk bought it late last year.
Twitter traffic tanking. https://t.co/KSIXqNsu40 pic.twitter.com/mLlbuXVR6r
— Matthew Prince 🌥 (@eastdakota) July 9, 2023
However, external data shared by CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince this weekend suggests that there has been a steady decline in Twitter’s traffic since January 2023, “tanking” and hitting an all-year low in July.
Musk has responded by threatening legal action against Meta over Threads. In a letter on Wednesday to Zuckerberg, an attorney representing Twitter accused Meta of unlawfully using Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property by hiring former Twitter employees to create a “copycat” app.
Image credits: Header photo licensed via Depositphotos.
