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This is an excerpt of Sources by Alex Heath, a newsletter about AI and the tech industry, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week.
By all measures, Meta’s Threads app had a very good year. The app was Apple’s second-most-downloaded iOS app of the year, trailing only ChatGPT. Threads now has 400 million monthly and 150 million daily active users.
“There are consumers who are ravenous to consume the content.”
That growth is still coming mainly from Meta’s other platforms. “We do a lot of work in Instagram and Facebook to show off what’s going on in Threads,” Connor Hayes, the head of Threads, told me this week. The playbook: surface personalized Threads content in your Instagram and Facebook feeds, get you to download the app, then wean you off needing those nudges to check it consistently. “We do a bunch of work to get people off of being dependent on those promotions and wake up in the morning and just want to open the app,” Hayes explained.
Hayes, who helped launch Threads initially and was named its head in September, has been focused on clarifying the platform’s identity. In our conversation, he said the goal for Threads is to be “the place on the internet to talk about what’s going on in the world.” Practically, that means going vertical by vertical — sports, entertainment, news — and tipping both creators and consumers toward using the app more.
When it comes to competitors, Hayes is focused on more than just X. “Reddit has a ton of activity that is analogous to what happened on Twitter in the early days,” he said. “Discord has a bunch of these big group chat-style communities.” He acknowledged Twitter, now X, as “the app that pioneered the core format,” but made clear that the battle for real-time conversation is crowded.
A traffic channel for creators
There’s no direct monetization for creators on Threads right now. Hayes is pitching something different: Threads as a traffic channel to other platforms where creators actually get paid.
The clearest example is podcasts. Threads recently launched a feature that renders show and episode links from platforms like Spotify and lets users pin them to their profiles. Hayes said Threads is open to other partnerships with platforms like Substack and Patreon as well. But there’s no plan to let creators paywall content directly on Threads or to share ad revenue like YouTube.
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