A few months after first testing ads in select markets, including the US, Meta announced on Wednesday that the Instagram thread app will expand its ads to all advertisers around the world. The expansion will allow eligible advertisers to “reach over 320 million monthly active users, including access to inventory filters to control the sensitivity level of content on which ADS is run.
The company says new ad placement within the Threads feed will be turned on by default for all new ad campaigns using either Meta's Advantage+ or Manual Placements. However, advertisers with the latter plan have the option to opt out of the thread feed.
Meta points out that the ads themselves will only be delivered in selected markets at launch and will be deployed in more markets over time.
So far, threads have tested ads in the US and Japan.
The expansion shows that Meta believes the thread community is robust enough to monetize and compete with the advertiser dollar against top rival Elon Musk's X. Furthermore, Meta believes its platform is more advertiser-friendly.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told investors about the company's latest revenue call in January that he hopes the threads will reach more than 1 billion over the next “years.” He also said the network is adding “over 1 million signups per day.”
However, the threading app itself was not fully grown organically. Instead, it benefited from the network effect of being connected to Instagram, and was built on existing friends graphs on Instagram when onboarding new users. This allowed the thread to act almost instantly as an extension of the user's Instagram network, allowing them to follow similar friends, creators and brands, just like before.
Its competitiveness is based on the basis of owning and operating some of the world's largest social networks, and is currently defended by Meta in an antitrust trial with the US Federal Trade Commission. If the government's prosecution is successful, the trial could ultimately force Meta to sell Instagram and WhatsApp.
To help the thread grow, Meta has borrowed concepts from emerging social networks such as Mastodon and Bluesky.
Like Mastodon, Meta integrates apps with the ActivityPub protocol. This protocol connects threads to a more widely distributed open web known as The Wediverse. That integration is not yet complete, but as a result, the thread could become the biggest service operated by Fediverse. As a result, we will reduce Mastodon's monthly active rate of over 8 million registered users and under 1 million.
In total, today's Fediverse (not including threads) is north of 16 million users.
The thread also copied some of Bluesky's more common features, including the ability to create custom feeds outside the default algorithm feed, introduced its own take on BlueSky's starter pack, and provided a curated list of recommended users for newcomers to follow.
Unlike Bluesky, which currently has over 35 million users, threaded users default to the thread's “For You” feed when launching the app. Nor does it have the option to control your own moderation preferences, as does Bluesky users.