This is now gathering pace and could be the next big social media marketing player, albeit organically so far.

In Meta's Q3 earnings call today, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that Threads is now at 275 million monthly active users after jumping from 200 million MAU that Meta reported back in August.
This is a gigantic leap in pace.

For comparison, Threads grew 100 million MAU to 175 million in nine months. That was 8.3 million new users added per month. Now, it added 100 million more actives in only three months. This tripled the rate of growth from the beginning.

Which makes intuitive sense when you think about it, considering that as more people become exposed to the content and more exclusive content keeps getting published, more will follow.

Threads has also been exposed to Elon Musk's sometimes chaotic changes at X, which have allowed for an uptick in misinformation, especially political falsehoods, within the application. Musks' support for Trump's re-election campaign saw the app become increasing saturated with political conversation and was spearheaded by Musk himself, who caused many users to lose interest in the app.

Since people have had it with politics becoming the dominant feature in their social feeds. In reality, Meta had been moving away from politics for precisely this reason, based on user feedback which indicated people were using Facebook less due to political divides.

But Musk, having leveled the former moderation team at Twitter, appears instead to be relying on an expanded version of crowd-sourced Community Notes, after setting politics as a top priority for himself as he works to get Trump reinstated back into the White House through his own clout.

Perhaps this is what more X users have been driven away from, perhaps it is just the general feeling of the app. Nonetheless, however, Threads has emerged a big winner in the war, with the app apparently now set on the trajectory to become an actual rival for X in the space of real-time discussions.

However, in my own opinion, threads' loathing for content on anything political will continue to slow down its progress in that regard.

It seems that the limitation of the visibility and reach of specific subjects goes against what should be a substitute for Twitter: hosting all kinds of trending conversations. Now even then, at 275 million that's a number, and if it maintains its growth rate of one million new sign-ups per day also highlighted by Zuckerberg on today's earnings call, Threads would then stand a good chance of pipping X to its monthly active user count around next June.

Could that really be? Could Threads actually usurp X's 500 million monthly active users, and actually be the go-to for this niche on social media?

I actually do think Meta needs to revisit its political limits aside from that, though the growing momentum at the app puts it squarely on course to become the next big platform.

For Meta, that also means advertising; however, Meta noted during its earnings call that it doesn't anticipate Threads contributing to its revenue in 2025.
Meta had said earlier that it'll consider adding ads on Threads only when the app will reach a billion users. However, some researchers pointed out that Meta has started adding Threads placements as a coming option for ad campaigns.

But I doubt Meta'll make it this long till they reach a billion actives, of course. Given how the platform keeps picking up steam, maybe sooner than any of us could have thought either way.

Bottom line: Threads emerges as a legitimate challenger to X. Still has a long way to go, but things could change in an instant. Still, the numbers are indicative of seemingly being on the right track.