Threads, the new Meta-owned rival to Twitter, reached 100 million sign-ups within five days of launching, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said.
The rapid rise in numbers puts Threads ahead of ChatGPT as the fastest growing online platform ever. The generative AI tool reached 100 million users around two months after launch, a feat quickly eclipsed by the new social media platform.
“That’s mostly organic demand, and we haven’t even turned on many promotions yet,” Zuckerberg said in a Threads post.
Threads has been labeled a “Twitter Killer” by many commentators, as users appear to have flooded from the Elon Musk-owned platform to Meta’s latest offering. Users with Instagram accounts can use their details to quickly set up an account on Threads, and take their followers with them. This gave the platform an advantage over other Twitter competitors, who asked users to start from scratch.
Twitter, in contrast, is reportedly in crisis. The platform’s web traffic was down 11% from a year earlier in the days just after the launch of Threads. That is compared to a 4% yearly decrease prior to the launch, according to data from Similarweb. In a tweet earlier in the week, Matthew Prince, CEO of internet infrastructure company Cloudflare said Twitter’s traffic was “tanking.”
Twitter’s owner Musk responded to the success of Threads by threatening to sue Meta, claiming it had used trade secrets to build its app. The new app was launched at an opportune time by Meta, as Twitter recently drew the ire of users after it limited the number of tweets they could view per day.
Currently, Threads has no advertisements, and Zuckerberg has said they won’t be added for at least the first year. The app has been launched without several features Twitter users are accustomed to, such as direct messages, hashtags, and a chronological feed.