For a year and a half of its existence, Threads stood out among other Meta apps because it was completely free of ads that have filled almost every corner of Facebook and Instagram. This is about to change. Meta is launching its first “small test” of advertising on Threads, Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri has announced, as the company hopes to finally start making money from the service.
The ads will appear in the form of posts with images between content in users’ feeds and will be shown only to a “small percentage of people” in the US and Japan. According to Mosseri, Meta plans to start with “a small number of brands” in these two countries. “We know there will be a lot of feedback on how we should approach the ads, and we’re trying to make them look like Threads posts that you find relevant and interesting,” he wrote. “We’ll be monitoring this test closely before scaling it more broadly, with the goal of making Threads ads as engaging as organic content.”
It looks like Meta is using its existing advertising infrastructure to serve ads in the app. In its blog post, the company explains that brands can “extend their existing Meta ad campaigns to Threads – without the need for special creative or additional resources – simply by checking a box in Ads Manager.” The company will also be testing its “inventory filter” on Threads, which “allows advertisers to control the level of sensitivity of the organic content next to which their ads appear.” This is likely to be an important feature for marketers as Meta loosens its content moderation rules and once again allows more political content to appear in user recommendations.
Although the initial test is small, the use of existing advertising tools will allow Meta to scale Threads ads very quickly in the future to many more advertisers and 300 million users. Mark Zuckerberg has previously noted that he prefers a slow approach to building the Threads advertising business. “We deliver all these new products, and then there’s a multi-year time horizon between scaling them and then implementing them not only in the consumer experience, but in very large businesses,” the CEO said last year.
