Threads may start receiving ads much earlier than Meta reported. According to a new report in The Information, the company plans to add advertising to its new app “early next year,” with the first ads appearing in January 2025.
This indicates that Meta is looking to start making money from the fast-growing service much sooner than Meta executives had previously suggested. In August, when the app reached 200 million users, Mark Zuckerberg said that Threads could be the company’s next billion-user service. He said that making money from the app would be a “multi-year” effort.
“We deliver all these new products, and then there’s a multi-year time horizon between scaling them and scaling them not only for consumers but for very large businesses,” Zuckerberg said. In the company’s latest financial report, Meta CFO Susan Lee said that the company does not expect Threads “to be a meaningful revenue driver in 2025 at this time.”
According to The Information, Meta is planning a slow rollout of advertising on Threads. The company will start with a “small number” of advertisers in January. It is unclear how quickly this could expand. “As our priority is to create customer value first, there are currently no ads or monetization features on Threads,” a Meta spokesperson said in a statement.
The plans announced by Meta emphasize how fast the service has been growing in recent months. According to Zuckerberg, Threads has 275 million monthly users and registers more than 1 million new users every day. This makes it by far the biggest alternative to X to emerge in the last few years.
Bluesky, another popular Twitter-like service, has also seen significant growth recently, adding one million new users in the last week, the company said on Tuesday. This is still far less than Threads with its 15 million users. Like Threads, it also currently has no ads, and the company has said it plans to experiment with subscription-based features.
