Threads could start getting ads much sooner than Meta previously revealed. According to a new report from The Information, the company is now planning to bring ads to its new app “early next year,” with the first ads arriving in January 2025.
This suggests that Meta wants to start making money on the fast-growing service much sooner than Meta executives previously suggested. In August, when the app reached 200 million users, Mark Zuckerberg said that Threads could become the company’s next billion-user service. He added that making money from the app would be a “multi-year” effort.
“All of these new products, we ship them, and then there’s a multi-year time horizon between scaling them and then scaling them into not just consumer experiences but very large businesses,” Zuckerberg said. In the company’s most recent earnings call, Meta CFO Susan Lee said the company “does not expect Threads to be a meaningful driver of 2025 revenue at this time.”
According to The Information, Meta is planning a slow rollout for ads on Threads. The company will begin with a “small number” of advertisers in January. It’s unclear how quickly this effort could expand. “Since our priority is to build consumer value first and foremost, there are currently no ads or monetization features on Threads,” a Meta spokesperson said in a statement.
Meta’s reported plans highlight how quickly the service has grown in recent months. According to Zuckerberg, Threads has 275 million monthly users and is seeing more than 1 million new sign-ups per day. That makes it by far the largest of the X alternatives that have emerged in the past few years.
BlueSky, another popular Twitter-like service, has also seen significant growth recently, adding one million new users in the past week, the company said on Tuesday. It’s still much smaller than Threads, which has 15 million users. Like Threads, it also currently has no ads and the company has said it plans to experiment with subscription-based features.