Within hours of its release, Mark Zuckerberg's Threads app overtook all other Twitter rivals in terms of user base, gaining three times as many users.
In the first 12 hours after its Thursday release, 22 million people signed up for the newest app from parent company Meta, which also owns Facebook and Instagram.
The text-based social media app aims to provide a substitute for Twitter, which has been plagued by problems and controversies ever since Elon Musk took control of it last year.
Other Twitter competitors, such as Donald Trump's Truth Social, have not yet amassed enough users to be taken seriously as competitors. The former US president's app has about 2 million active monthly users, compared to an estimated 4.5 million users for Bluesky, Mastodon, Parler, and Tribel combined.
Though Mr. Musk's app still has more than 10-times the number of active users, it took Twitter about three years to reach the user count that Threads did on its first day.
Despite its success, the number of users is still far below that of Twitter, which in the first half of the year had an estimated 330 million monthly active users.
Unknown is how many of the new Threads users were previously Twitter users and whether they will stick with Mr. Musk's platform permanently if they were.
Given that it launches at a time when some users' dissatisfaction with Twitter is growing, some analysts think Threads may end up being the most widely used text-based social media app.
For Elon Musk's doomed social network, Threads appears to be the Twitter killer and has launched at the worst possible time, according to Drew Benvie, CEO of consulting firm Battenhall.
The eagerly awaited Twitter replacement will give Instagram's two billion users a more dependable and practical way to engage in social media, just like Twitter once did. But I anticipate that users will cast their votes with their fingers as Twitter becomes more expensive, unsafe, and unreliable than ever.
In the first 12 hours after its Thursday release, 22 million people signed up for the newest app from parent company Meta, which also owns Facebook and Instagram.
The text-based social media app aims to provide a substitute for Twitter, which has been plagued by problems and controversies ever since Elon Musk took control of it last year.
Other Twitter competitors, such as Donald Trump's Truth Social, have not yet amassed enough users to be taken seriously as competitors. The former US president's app has about 2 million active monthly users, compared to an estimated 4.5 million users for Bluesky, Mastodon, Parler, and Tribel combined.
Though Mr. Musk's app still has more than 10-times the number of active users, it took Twitter about three years to reach the user count that Threads did on its first day.
Despite its success, the number of users is still far below that of Twitter, which in the first half of the year had an estimated 330 million monthly active users.
Unknown is how many of the new Threads users were previously Twitter users and whether they will stick with Mr. Musk's platform permanently if they were.
Given that it launches at a time when some users' dissatisfaction with Twitter is growing, some analysts think Threads may end up being the most widely used text-based social media app.
For Elon Musk's doomed social network, Threads appears to be the Twitter killer and has launched at the worst possible time, according to Drew Benvie, CEO of consulting firm Battenhall.
The eagerly awaited Twitter replacement will give Instagram's two billion users a more dependable and practical way to engage in social media, just like Twitter once did. But I anticipate that users will cast their votes with their fingers as Twitter becomes more expensive, unsafe, and unreliable than ever.
