More than 10 million people have signed up to Threads, Meta’s rival to Twitter, within the first few hours of its launch, the company’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Thursday, 6th July 2023.
“10 million sign ups in seven hours,” Zuckerberg wrote on his official Threads account today.
The App went live on Apple and Android app stores in 100 countries at 11pm on Wednesday, 5th July 2023, and will run with no ads for now, but its release in Europe has been delayed over data privacy concerns.
Threads, is the biggest challenger yet to Elon Musk owned Twitter, which has seen a series of potential competitors emerge but not yet replace one of the world’s biggest social media platforms, despite its struggles.
Accounts were already active for celebrities such as Jennifer Lopez, Shakira and Hugh Jackman, as well as media outlets including The Washington Post and The Economist.
Zuckerberg also offered a shot across the bow at Musk, the pair are known to be bitter rivals, and have offered to wrestle it out in a cage fight.
In his first tweet in over a decade, Zuckerberg posted a Spiderman pointing at Spiderman meme in an apparent reference to the similarities between Threads.
On Threads, he wrote: “It’ll take some time, but I think there should be a public conversations app with 1 billion+ people on it. Twitter has had the opportunity to do this but hasn’t nailed it. Hopefully we will.”
Twitter has said it has more than 200 million daily users.
– ‘Be kind’ –
Threads was introduced as a clear spin-off of Instagram, which offers a built-in audience of more than two billion users, sparing the new platform the challenge of starting from scratch.
Story: Christy Dung