Threads nears its one-year anniversary with more than 175M monthly active users

Meta’s Threads now has more than 175 million monthly active users, Mark Zuckerberg announced on Wednesday. The announcement comes two days away from Threads’ first anniversary. Zuckerberg revealed back in April that Threads had more than 150 million monthly active users, up from the 130 million reported in February.

Threads launched on July 3, 2023, at a time when users were looking for an alternative to X (formerly Twitter) after Elon Musk introduced sweeping changes to the social network.

The updated metric comes as Musk recently claimed that X now reaches 600 million monthly active users, and that half of these users use the platform daily. It’s worth mentioning that Musk didn’t clarify if the number includes automated accounts or spam bots.

As part of today’s announcement, Meta revealed insights into how people are using Threads. Meta says most people are coming to Threads for text rather than images, noting that 63% of all Threads posts are text-only. But, that doesn’t mean images aren’t shared on Threads, as one in four posts include at least one image.

The company says more than 50 million Tags have been created, with the top three being PhotographyThreads, BookThreads and GymThreads.

While the metric of monthly active users alone isn’t enough to fully gauge how well Threads is doing, it does show that the platform has a notable amount of users checking it out. Part of Threads’ success is likely due to the fact that the platform is somewhat integrated and promoted within Instagram.

Since its launch, Threads has been introducing numerous requested features, such as a web app, trending topics and an edit button. Although the platform is looking to somewhat align its experience and features with X, it is staying away from political discourse. While Meta says it won’t amplify news in Threads, X remains the most popular platform for people to discuss live events like last week’s presidential debate.