Two years later, Threads is starting to look more and more like X’s most viable competitor. Earlier this year, its monthly audience exceeded 350 million users, and Mark Zuckerberg predicted that it could become the next Meta app with a billion user audience.
But Threads still doesn’t send a lot of traffic to other websites, which may make the platform less attractive to authors, publishers, and others whose businesses depend on non-Meta websites. According to Similarweb, a marketing intelligence firm, outbound referral traffic from Threads grew to 28.4 million visits in June. This is a notable jump from 15.1 million visits a year ago, but still relatively small considering that, according to Similarweb, Threads currently has an average of more than 115 million users per day on its app.
Longtime Threads users have long suspected that Meta was de-prioritizing posts with links. For most of the past two years of Threads’ existence, users have believed that links should not be shared, or should only be shared as replies to the original post. Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri, who also oversees Threads, hasn’t been too encouraging of link sharing either. Last year, he said that Threads doesn’t intentionally downgrade links, but “we don’t put much stock in them” because “people don’t really like and comment on links.”
