Meta's Threads app, which just went live last Wednesday evening, already reached 100 million users on Sunday, handily beating ChatGPT's recently set record for achieving that many users in a brief span of time.

Thanks in part to the easy tie-in with Instagram, Threads took off like wildfire last week, gaining its first two million users in just two hours. Flash-forward to Sunday, and signups on the app hit 100 million users — though it's still way too early to tell whether this thing will be compelling and "sticky" enough to retain those users and keep them active.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg tweeted Monday that this milestone was "mostly organic demand" and the company hasn't "even turned on many promotions yet." He previously posted that the launch success was "way beyond our expectations."

It certainly helps that people seem to be responding quickly and downloading the app, because apps like Mastodon and BlueSky — which was self-limiting its user base with invitations — don't have the critical mass to make them rivals to Twitter yet.

Of the 100-million milestone, Instagram chief Adam Mosseri posted Monday, "It's insane; I can't make sense of it." He added that the team has been using, as a mantra, "Make it work, make it great, make it grow," and that with this rapid growth they "certainly did things out of order." But, he promises, "we will make this thing great."

Analysts are already predicting that Threads will have 200 million daily active users by 2025, and that it will be able to generate $8 billion in extra annual revenue for Meta over the next two years, as Bloomberg reports. That remains a fraction of Meta's overall revenue, which was $117 billion last year, and is forecast to hit $156 billion in two years.

It remains to be seen whether the Twitter ship can be turned around, either by new CEO Linda Yaccarino, by shadow CEO Elon Musk, or by someone else once Musk tires of this expensive and problematic plaything. Yaccarino tweeted last week, regarding the new competition from Threads, "We’re often imitated — but the Twitter community can never be duplicated."

We know Musk isn't taking this competition from Meta lightly, and he had his attorney draft the equivalent of a cease-and-desist letter last week over Threads. The letter referred to the "unlawful misappropriation of Twitter's trade secrets," and claimed that Meta had "hired dozens of former Twitter employees" and used them to build Threads.

Meta communications director Andy Stone posted a response to Threads saying, "No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee. That’s just not a thing."

On Sunday, when Threads hit the 100 million mark, Musk tweeted, "You will get more laughs from this app than everything else combined / But I have to warn you … don’t be shocked … there’s some negative stuff too." He separately tweeted on Tuesday morning, "You are free to be your true self here."

Whether Musk is actually worried, it's hard to say, but his tenure at Twitter has not reportedly borne fruit in terms of cashflow yet — after the layoffs, the new subscription service, etc. The Wall Street Journal estimates that Twitter's ad revenue in the second quarter was down 40% year over year, and the estimated 850,000 signups to Twitter Blue are not going to be too meaningful to the bottom line.

CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince posted a traffic chart to Threads on Sunday saying "Twitter traffic is tanking." And as The Verge and Wall Street Journal note, Twitter's active user base seems to be a fair bit smaller than it was last fall when Musk took over. Twitter recently told advertisers at the Cannes Lions conference that the platform now has roughly 535 million monetizable monthly active users — but Musk himself tweeted in November that Twitter had 260 million monetizable daily active users, and the switch to monthly users as a data point indicates they may be trying to downplay what the real daily figure now is.

Jasmine Enberg, a principal analyst at Insider Intelligence, tells the Wall Street Journal that while Threads likely won't be a fatal blow to Twitter, with Meta's scale and manpower, "it is going to be another severe wound to Twitter."

The other wounds, though, so far, have been self-inflicted.

Previously: Elon-Zuck Battle Heats Up With Musk Threatening Lawsuit Over Meta’s Copycat Product Threads

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