Almost immediately following the launch of Threads in early July, Meta’s new text-based app and Twitter competitor, questions started popping up about monetization.
It’s only reasonable to wonder since Meta is an advertising company at heart.
But Meta has an established playbook for monetizing its apps, evidenced by how it’s been rolling out ads in Reels, its short-form video feature. Meta waited for engagement to reach critical mass before introducing advertising.
Threads was “built as a consumer-first vehicle – that’s really the bottom line,” says Alvin Bowles, who was promoted to VP of Meta’s global business group, speaking on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks.
But CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said that Meta will consider monetizing Threads once users cross the 1 billion mark, which may not be that far off, so long as Meta can maintain its momentum. Less than three weeks after launch, Threads already has more than 150 million users.
“We’ve gotten to a point where we do measure success in billions,” Bowles says.
Although most new Threads users are being converted from Instagram – people can’t sign up for Threads without also creating an Instagram account – much has been made of Threads as a Twitter killer.
Zuckerberg himself has thrown shade in Twitter’s direction. He posted (on Threads, of course) that he believes “there should be a public conversation app with 1 billion+ people on it. Twitter has had the opportunity to do this but hasn’t nailed it.”
Bowles, however, takes a slightly more diplomatic tack.
“From a competition perspective, public conversation isn’t something you win,” Bowles says. “A healthy ecosystem includes competition.”
Also in this episode: Reacting to recent glitches in Meta’s advertising machine, dealing with ongoing privacy challenges in the US and Europe, and who Bowles would bet on in the event of a Zuckerberg/Elon Musk cage fight.
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