Threads Achieve Over 175M Active Users Ahead of First Anniversary With India Taking the Lead

Meta's Threads has achieved over 175 million monthly active users, as disclosed by CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday. This comes just before the platform's first anniversary.

Threads, which aims to rival X (formerly Twitter), was launched on July 5 last year. It becomes a place where people feel comfortable sharing their thoughts and ideas. This rapid growth was partly due to the seamless integration for Instagram users to set up their Threads profiles. However, some early adopters later stopped using the app.

"What a year," Zuckerberg remarked in a Threads post. In April, he reported that Threads had over 150 million monthly active users.

Despite its initial success and international expansion, Threads has faced challenges in maintaining user engagement. According to Sensor Tower, a market intelligence firm, the average user engaged with the app for three sessions and seven minutes per day last month. This is a significant drop of about 79% and 65%, respectively, from July last year.

Threads do not feature advertising and recently joined the Fediverse-a network of social media sites supporting the ActivityPub protocol-allowing interaction across different platforms.

"A year after launch, we know what Threads isn't, but we don't know what it is," said eMarketer analyst Jasmine Enberg. She noted that the lack of direction and original content could hinder its growth.

She further stated "Meta must be wondering whether it makes sense to keep Threads as a standalone app or to direct that engagement back to Instagram. The good news is that advertiser interest in the platform is high,"

To celebrate the first anniversary, Meta is bringing a few new features. One of the first community features will allow people to tag a topic on a Threads post, and better enable discovery and engagement with posts they care about.

In the same, India is one of the most active countries for Threads globally with popular tags and topics related to film, TV and OTT content, celebrity-related conversations and sports.