Instagram's Threads has close to 100 million subscribers after launching five days ago
According to a count by Search Engine Journal (SEJ), Instagram's new social media platform Threads is closing in on 100 million subscribers. Threads has been designed to challenge Twitter which has been in a freefall dive ever since it was purchased last October by Elon Musk. Musk has created an unstable environment at Twitter by going back and forth on checkmarks, letting employees go that he found out later were vital to Twitter's operations, and most recently slapping a cap on the number of tweets users can view in a day.
The instability of Musk's leadership has made Twitter vulnerable
In true Musk fashion, the cap on the number of tweets subscribers could view daily seemed to be arbitrarily conceived and then hiked later in the same day. You can't blame Elon for trying numerous ways to monetize Twitter; after all, even for one of the richest men in the world, $44 billion is a lot of money to spend on a single purchase. But the instability of Musk's reign has led competitors and advertisers to feel that Twitter is vulnerable.
Zuckerberg says that the reaction to Threads went way beyond Meta's expectations
You might wonder how SEJ was able to determine how many subscribers Meta-owned Instagram has signed up to Threads. Here's the thing; to become a Threads subscriber you need to have an Instagram account. And once you open a Threads account, you will see a temporary badge on your Instagram profile with the Threads logo and a number that corresponds to your subscriber number. For example, I was the 58,434,092th subscriber to join Threads a couple of days ago. SEJ says that it counted the number of badges on Instagram profiles to come up with the 97 million number.
Screenshot from Threads at left, and Instagram at center and right
Meta CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg posted when the subscriber count reached 70 million that the response to the new platform has been "Way beyond our expectations." And while nothing stops anyone from having subscriptions to both Twitter and Threads, the most telling info will be whether the number of posts on Threads is higher than the number of tweets on Twitter on a sustained basis.
While Threads hasn't started accepting ads yet, eventually it will. One major question is whether advertisers that dumped Twitter after Musk took over decide to spend some of their marketing budget to post ads on Threads.
How to subscribe to Threads
To subscribe to Threads, you can download the app from the appropriate app storefront which would be the App Store for iPhone users, and the Play Store for Android users. You'll be asked to log in with your existing Instagram account. Already there have been some notable subscribers. 9to5Mac says that Apple News, Apple Books, Apple Music, Shazam and Beats by Dre sign up for Threads accounts. It also says that fast food purveyor Wendy's and some celebrities have also subscribed to Threads.
Interestingly, there has been no official word on what to call a post on Threads. On Twitter, each message is called a tweet and some suggest that this should also be used as a name for posts on Threads. Others have suggested calling them threads but a thread already means a series of posts started by a single subscriber on a social media platform. One suggestion was to call them "Zucks" referencing Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. However, even if Zuckerberg is detested less than Musk, he generally is not popular among the general population.
If you have a suggestion on what to call posts on Threads, let us know by dropping a comment in the box below. And keep in mind that because you need an Instagram account to subscribe to Threads, if you delete your Threads account, your linked Instagram account also goes bye-bye. Don't say that we didn't warn you.
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