Tech reporter Alexandra Sternlicht here, filling in for David.
It’s Threads’ first Friday, and it feels as though the “first day of school” vibe that characterized the app’s euphoric launch has shifted ever so slightly.
To stick with the metaphor, users and creators seem to have moved into Threads’ proverbial auditorium for the talent show on Meta’s text-based app: Everyone is there, they’ve settled in, and they’re ready to experience all of the joy and all of the cringe.
“WHY AM I CHECKING THREADS FIRST THING WHEN I WAKE UP HELPPPP,” YouTube’s leading Shorts creator Alan Chikin Chow wrote in a Threads post this morning.
“Me canceling my weekend plans to be in this unhinged chat room,” writes meme account MyTherapistSays in another post from the same time.
From a business standpoint, Meta seems to have graduated from its stock-tanking Metaverse days. By allowing people to keep their Instagram followers on Threads, the social network became the most rapidly downloaded app ever. Right now, Threads is on pace to exceed over 100 million users in two months, according to SimilarWeb, per the New York Times. The stock price, too, has risen by 11% in the past month, and many are speculating Threads will kill Twitter.
Creators interviewed by Fortune, who don’t consider Twitter a top platform in their monetization and audience strategies, are very excited about the potential to tap Threads for both fan engagement and monetization down the line.
“It’s better than Twitter already because of the main page algorithm, and it’s fresh and exciting haha,” Peet Montzingo, who has over 13 million YouTube subscribers, wrote in a text to me. “Honestly, I feel like as soon as ads are incorporated then it’ll be the real test.”
As Montzingo notes, advertising and monetization remain pressing issues for creators and agencies alike. Right now, Threads does not have ads—a certain contributor to the app’s wide-eyed freshman energy—but agencies are preparing strategies to attract client business when the platform inevitably monetizes. Joe Gagliese, cofounder and CEO of influencer agency Viral Nation, tells Fortune that his strategy team is “all over it” to find opportunities for brands deriving value from Threads.
“Brands for a long time have seen the value of advertising through Twitter, especially in a paid capacity,” Gagliese adds. “But that channel has obviously changed for a lot of brands—so there’s a lot of potential economy that can be built around text from a marketing and programmatic perspective.”
For brands to benefit from advertising on Threads, the platform needs to be filled with primo organic content. Now that rival platforms like YouTube and TikTok are paying larger-scale creators for contributions, Threads already is facing stiff competition.
This is especially significant as Meta has a mixed record in compensating creators. “Meta has taken away monetization on almost all of their other platforms, so as a creator it’s not something I’m holding my breath for,” Dalton Brock (Esportscenter), who reports making $3,000 and $6,000 per month from TikTok’s Creativity Program Beta, told me over text.
Still, creators seem excited to tap Threads for both audience interaction and future monetization. The group of creators I interviewed—all have at least 600,000 Instagram followers and work as full-time social media influencers—had not been compensated to join or post on Threads at the time of launch. These creators are less interested in Meta paying them for their contributions than they are to use the platform to bolster their audiences and subsequently sweeten brand partnerships.
“I’m focusing on just building the audience and figuring out what works and what doesn’t,” says Adam Waheed, who, with 12.8 million YouTube subscribers and 6 million on Instagram, was invited to Threads prelaunch and became its 242nd user. The comedic video star now has 344,000 followers on the platform. “I will always be able to monetize off a platform if I have a following on there—it might not be directly, but it’ll be very lucrative, in my opinion.”
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Alexandra Sternlicht
Data Sheet’s daily news section was written and curated by David Meyer.
