Meta claims Threads racked up 175 M monthly active users, but it does not tell the full picture

When Threads first arrived last year, the online space urgently needed a “Twitter alternative,” especially after Elon Musk’s takeover that, let’s be real, has been quite controversial so far. The Tesla boss fired lots of Twitter employees, but the nail in the coffin came last summer when Musk renamed Twitter “X” and killed the iconic blue bird.

From that crisis, Threads arrived as a so-called “Twitter killer.” While Meta has its own fair share of controversies regarding its data collection practice, the need for such things outweighs it. Threads’ arrival in Europe was delayed for quite some time since, initially, it did not allow users to create accounts independently of Instagram.

But even then, Threads has been quite a success. Now, a year after its launch, Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg claims that its micro-blogging app has reached 175 million monthly active users and over 50 million topic tags. India and Japan are some of the most active countries that use the app, which Meta ties to its integration with Instagram and localized content strategies.

While the monthly active users count does not necessarily tell the full story of how well a social media app is doing, it still says something. To put things into perspective, Twitter has about over 368 million monthly active users worldwide, more or less. Meta’s Instagram has about 2 billion, and Facebook has 3 billion.

But, since many Threads users come from Instagram promotions, where you’d see Threads posts even when scrolling on the video and images-sharing app, it does raise the question: does Threads have a lot of daily active, returning users? This would give a better idea of its success than just the monthly user count.

Dramatically, when Threads first arrived, the app reached its 100 million users milestone in just five days, surpassing even ChatGPT’s rapid growth.