Threads is contributing a huge amount of behavioural data to Instagram ad profiles so it may never need to run ads in order to provide significant value to the company. That's going to place X at a disadvantage over the long term.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/23889057/mark-zuckerberg-meta-ai-el...
However, every time I open the app it's basically a ghost town. I personally don't know anyone using it, so I just see a bunch of brand and celebrity posts.
Threads feels more like a platform for brands than for regular people.
And they have the cash to keep Threads going for decades whereas X is in a financial hole. Linda is meeting with creditors [1] who are freaking out over the drop in valuation and she doesn't even know whether the company plans to be advertising or subscription driven.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/474b30e9-a726-4571-8475-9adabbbc8...
Meta, the company currently named after their attempted pivot to a VR social network that utterly bombed? I'll certainly grant that they built one social network, but it is less obvious to me that they can repeat it on command.
Not really. Zuckerburg got lucky once, the rest was purchased.
Like him or hate him, Zuckerberg’s strategies have been great for his company. I don’t know about his VR business, but he’s like a Midas king when it comes to social media. Everything social media related he’s touched has turned into gold. Instagram and WhatsApp were already kind of big, but they’re were not the ubiquitous behemoths they are today.
Threads could be his first big fail though.
The whole Oculus mess does seem to indicate he doesn't have a Midas touch. And let's not forget the metaverse, which isn't going at all well.
Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Workplace, Threads.
The latter has reached 130m+ users after all.
I'd rather think that Facebook had been consistently successful in catering its cohort. That targeted cohort might just have too little overlap with users in market for Twitter/Mastodon/Threads, but as far as Facebook/Instagram(post-acquisition) are concerned the users seem satisfied with Meta-run social media to me.
And if building a hundred million user social network in such a rapid timeframe isn't a success not sure what is.
Instagram had 30 million users at the time of acquisition. Scaling that to billions of users is not trivial nor is it inevitable.