Meta Launches Twitter Clone Threads (And We’re There Too)

Elon Musk’s Twitter successor X has a new strong competitor in Europe since Thursday. The Facebook group Meta launched its short messaging service Threads in the EU and Switzerland after more than five months of delays.

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Threads is based on Meta’s photo and video platform Instagram. This means the service can rely on connections between hundreds of millions of users from scratch, while other X competitors have to create them from scratch.

Users can use Instagram credentials to log into threads. You can also use the service without a profile, but then you cannot create your own messages or interact with messages from other users.

Meta left out the EU and Switzerland when Threads launched in July. The group justified this with legal ambiguities regarding “new digital laws”. According to observers, this likely meant the double package of the Digital Services Act (DSA) and the Digital Markets Act (DMA).

Zuckerberg sees potential for well over a billion users

According to the latest figures from the fall, Threads had approximately 100 million monthly active users. Facebook founder and Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg emphasizes that he sees potential for a service focused on public debate with more than a billion users.

However, Threads is different in many ways from Twitter and X. Instagram boss Adam Mosseri said the service should not be too focused on news. It remains to be seen whether Threads will be a direct replacement for Twitter’s role as a place to feel the pulse of the world.

Meta is German

Departure of major advertising clients on X

According to market researchers, the number of users of the online platform has fallen since Musk bought the short-message service Twitter and renamed it X. Recently, the departure of major advertising clients has also accelerated.

On the one hand, the reason was that Musk supported a message that contained an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. At almost the same time, hate speech researchers showed how ads from big-name brands could be displayed next to Nazi posts.

X claimed that the researchers manipulated the platform to achieve the desired result. Musk apologized for his X-post, saying it had been misunderstood.

But many major advertisers ran out of patience and continued to keep their ads off the platform. Musk then publicly insulted advertisers, accusing them of causing the platform to fail.

Musk depends on subscription revenue

Musk, the richest person in the world, paid about $44 billion (CHF38 billion) for Twitter in October 2022. Even before the recent exodus of ad customers, he says, X’s ad revenue was only half what it was during the Twitter era.

Musk relies more heavily on subscription revenue, but according to expert calculations, these revenues have not yet been able to fill the gap. Advertising has traditionally been by far the most important source of money for Twitter.

The financial service Bloomberg wrote this week that X is expected to generate a turnover of $2.5 billion this year. In 2021 that was more than five billion dollars.

Other competitors so far smaller

Several competitors see the opportunity to build on Twitter’s former importance with alternatives. Threads is seen as a particularly strong candidate thanks to Instagram as a basis.

Other competitors like Mastodon and Bluesky are still significantly smaller than X. Another challenger to X, first called T2 and then Pebble, has already gone bankrupt.

(sda/awp/dpa)