In the future, more and more people around the world will see ads on Threads. Back in January, Meta launched a small test of ads visible to a subset of users in the US and Japan, which included several brands. Threads had been completely ad-free since it became available a year and a half earlier, although Meta had been planning to place ads on the service for months before the test. Meta is currently deploying advertising on Threads in more than 30 countries. This means that ads will reach a larger percentage of the 300 million users, although it will be interesting to see if this will affect the service’s steady growth.
Target did not name the 30 countries, nor did it say how often the ads will appear in users’ feeds. As with the initial test period, ads will appear between organic content or posts from people and friends that users follow. Meta is also opening up advertising on Threads to all of its advertisers from around the world, so users will see ads from more companies, including those local to their countries. The company told us that it is taking a phased approach to rolling out the service, so ads may appear more and more frequently over time.
