Watch out, Elon: ‘I’ve thought for a long time there should be a billion-person public conversations app that is a bit more positive,’ says Meta’s CEO.
The rumors of Threads’ early demise have been exaggerated.
Meta’s competitor to Elon Musk’s X has hit “just under” 100 million monthly users since it was released in early July, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Wednesday during his company’s quarterly earnings call.
“We’re three months in now, and I’m very happy with the trajectory,” he said, echoing the bullish comments he made about how Threads is doing during a recent interview with The Verge. “We’re now getting to the point where we’re going to be focusing on growing the community further. From what we can tell, people love it so far.”
As the head of Instagram explained at the launch of Threads, Meta sees an opening to seriously compete with the platform formerly known as Twitter now that Musk has blown it up to create his X super app vision.
“I’ve thought for a long time there should be a billion-person public conversations app that is a bit more positive,” Zuckerberg said on Wednesday’s call. “I think that if we keep at this for a few more years, then I think we have a good chance of achieving our vision there.”
Meta CFO Susan Li shared some optimism, too. “Threads also remains a compelling long-term opportunity, and we’re excited to build on the strong product momentum we have going into next year,” she said during the call.
Meta launched Threads in July. While it was fairly barebones to start, the company has swiftly added a lot of welcome features, including a web app, the ability to search for posts, and an edit feature that you don’t have to pay for. The app remains unavailable in Europe due to Meta’s uncertainty about its ability to comply with new regulation there.
In a Threads post on Wednesday, Instagram chief Adam Mosseri said that “I’m hoping we can land support for Europe, early Fediverse progress, better Instagram integrations, and trends in the next few months.”
If you’re curious to hear Zuckerberg talk more about Threads, including his history of competing with Twitter and Meta’s plan to decentralize it, check out his recent interview on Decoder.
As part of its third-quarter earnings report, Meta said that it earned $34 billion in revenue, up 23 percent from the same quarter last year. However, it’s still burning cash with its Reality Labs division; the company expects its operating losses there to increase “meaningfully” year-over-year.
Update October 25th, 7:32PM ET: Added post from Adam Mosseri.
