Lagos, July 6, 2023 – About 10 million people have signed up to Threads, Meta’s rival to Twitter, within hours of its launch.
This is made known on Thursday by the Facebook parent’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Threads has been described as the biggest challenger to Elon Musk-owned Twitter, which has seen a series of potential competitors emerge.
The app went live on Apple and Android app stores in 100 countries at 2300 GMT on Wednesday, and will run with no ads for now.
“10 million sign ups in seven hours,” Zuckerberg wrote on his official Threads account Thursday.
Accounts were already active for celebrities such as Jennifer Lopez, Shakira and Hugh Jackman, as well as media outlets including The Washington Post and The Economist.
Zuckerberg spent the first few hours of the platform’s launch replying to new users.
“One thing that’s up is the number of world champion MMA fighters on Threads, especially now that you’re here!” he wrote in a reply to American MMA fighter Jon Jones.
“Round one of this thing is getting off to a good start,” he said in another.
Zuckerberg also offered a shot across the bow at Musk — the pair are known to be bitter rivals, and have even offered to meet each other in a fighting cage to wrestle it out.
In his first tweet in over a decade, Zuckerberg posted a Spiderman pointing at Spiderman meme in an apparent reference to the similarity of the two platforms.
Back on Threads, he wrote: “It’ll take some time, but I think there should be a public conversations app with 1 billion+ people on it. Twitter has had the opportunity to do this but hasn’t nailed it. Hopefully we will.”
Twitter has said it has more than 200 million daily users.
Threads was introduced as a clear spin-off of Instagram, which offers a built-in audience of more than two billion users, thereby sparing the new platform the challenge of starting from scratch.
