Instagram Threads Growth Is a Huge 'Surprise' Inside Meta and Twitter
Threads is the fastest-growing platform ever, and workers at Meta and Twitter didn't see it coming.
People at Meta are surprised. "I can't make sense of it," Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, said.
Meanwhile, an employee said Elon Musk and Twitter were sweating their "first legit competitor."
Meta employees had relatively low expectations for Threads, the text-based Instagram offshoot that was released Wednesday evening to compete with Twitter. Even Twitter employees were not particularly worried about yet another competitor showing up.
That changed quickly. By Monday, just five days after Threads launched, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that more than 100 million people had already signed up for the app and that its growth had been "mostly organic demand." It makes Threads the fastest-growing platform ever.
"I'm so surprised. Everyone is," a Meta employee who was involved with the release of Threads but did not work directly on the product, said of how quickly the app had amassed users.
Meta employees expected Threads to quickly get to millions of users and maybe even to 10 million because of its attachment to Instagram, the person added. Meta, formerly known as Facebook, made it easy for Instagram's average of 2 billion daily users to start using Threads and transfer their followers to the new app.
Reaching 100 million users was more than even Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, expected. He said in his Threads post that the growth was "insane."
"I can't make sense of it," Mosseri said.
A person familiar with the company said Twitter employees now saw Threads as the company's "first legit competitor" at a time when "so many people are rooting for Elon to fail." Elon Musk, the mercurial Tesla billionaire, bought Twitter late last year, bringing chaos to an app with a dedicated user and employee base — thousands of whom have been laid off or fired since the takeover.
"I never thought I'd want Zuckerberg to beat Twitter, but here we are," a former employee said.
Representatives for Meta and Twitter declined to comment.
Threads is 'serious competition'
A private worker poll on Blind seen by Insider showed that nearly 70% of about 200 Twitter employees responded "yes" to the prompt "Threads, RIP Twitter?" Blind is popular with tech workers, and the app only allows people with a verified work email address to participate in private forums.
A Twitter employee in another private post on Blind called Threads "serious competition" and said linking the app to Instagram instantly allowed "high value users and celebs to populate the graph."
"Average users only care about network effects and content," the person added. "Damn it Zuck, why can't you go back to worrying about the metaverse."
People at Twitter, including Musk, didn't expect anything like 100 million users on Threads in less than a week, one of the people familiar said. Musk quickly went on the defensive by sending a cease-and-desist letter to Zuckerberg based on seemingly weak legal claims and tweeting about his dislike of Instagram. As Zuckerberg continued to post about the Threads' daily growth, Musk called Zuckerberg a "cuck" and challenged him to a "dick measuring contest."
Musk and Twitter's new CEO, Linda Yaccarino, have not officially addressed Threads, similar to how they largely ignored employees surprised by "rate limits" for users for the July 4 holiday.
On Twitter, Yaccarino was also defensive but again took a more professional tack than Musk. She alluded to Threads in a Friday post: "We're often imitated – but the Twitter community can never be duplicated." On Monday, she posted that Twitter recently had its "largest usage day since February" but didn't give specific details.
"There is only ONE Twitter. You know it. I know it," Yaccarino added, signing off on the post with the microphone emoji, usually signaling a mic drop.
Meanwhile, remaining Twitter employees are "just trying to keep their heads down and work on payments and video," one of the people familiar with the company said. Musk is attempting to build up Twitter's video capabilities and make Twitter the "everything app," similar to WeChat in China.
Threads is a big opportunity for Meta
Already, Wall Street expects Threads to be a potential new source of cash at Meta. Last week, Meta's stock hit a new high for the last year at more than $294 per share.
Threads could hit 10% of Instagram's daily active users, or 200 million people using the app a day, which is close to Twitter's current 250 million daily active users, according to a Monday note written by Mark Mahaney, who heads internet research at Evercore ISI.
Another person familiar with the company said that Threads wasn't making money but that the app also cost Meta "almost nothing." The team of engineers that built the app is just 15 people, while the entire Threads team is just 50 people, with Threads operated through Instagram's existing infrastructure. And Meta doesn't pay any creators or celebrities to sign up for or post to Threads, two people familiar with the company said.
Mahaney estimated that Threads could generate $8 billion a year in additional revenue for Meta if it reached 200 million users. That's more than Twitter has ever generated. Twitter generated $5 billion in revenue in 2021, its most successful year and the last full year it reported earnings as a public company. Under Musk, Twitter's core advertising business has been decimated.
"Twitter's turbulent execution has opened up an opportunity for a competitor app," Mahaney said. "Meta has smartly taken advantage of this and its large 2B+ DAU community to jumpstart a new app that we believe poses very little downside for Meta's current business."
Source: Business Insider
