Threads could start serving ads much sooner than Meta had previously announced. The company is now planning to start serving ads on its latest app “early next year”, with the first ads appearing in January 2025, according to a new report from The Information.
This suggests that Meta is looking to start making money from the fast-growing service much sooner than company executives had previously indicated. In August, when the app reached 200 million users, Mark Zuckerberg said that Threads could become the company’s next billion-user service. He said it would take ‘several years’ for the app to start making money.
All of these new products are being shipped by us, and then there’s a multi-year time horizon between scaling, not just in terms of customer experience, but also in terms of very large companies,” Zuckerberg said. In the company’s most recent earnings call, Meta CFO Susan Li said that the company does not currently expect Threads to be a significant revenue driver in 2025.
According to The Information, Meta plans to roll out ads on Threads slowly. The company will start with a “small number” of advertisers in January. It is unclear how quickly the effort can be scaled up. ‘Because our priority is to create value for consumers first and foremost, there are currently no ads or monetisation features on Threads,’ a Meta spokesperson said in a statement.
Meta’s reported plans show how quickly the service has grown in recent months. Threads has 275 million monthly users and, according to Zuckerberg, sees more than 1 million new sign-ups every day. This makes it by far the largest of the X alternatives that have emerged in recent years.
Bluesky, another popular Twitter-like service, has also seen significant growth recently, adding 1 million new users in the last week, the company announced on Tuesday. However, with 15 million users, it is still much smaller than Threads. Like Threads, Bluesky does not currently advertise and the company has said it plans to experiment with subscription-based features.
