Thread based on Instagram
Meta starts competition with Musks X in the EU
December 14, 2023, 4:05 p.m
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Twitter became Mark Zuckerberg promises an alternative and is launching “Threads” – now also outside the USA.
Elon Musk’s Twitter successor X has a new strong competitor in Europe. The Facebook group Meta launched its short message service Threads in the EU after more than five months of delay. Threads is based on Meta’s photo and video platform Instagram. This means that the service can rely on connections between hundreds of millions of users right from the start, while other X competitors have to create these from scratch.
Users can use Instagram login data to log in to threads. You can also use the service without a profile – but then you cannot create your own posts or interact with posts from other users. Meta left out the EU when Threads launched in July. The group justified this with legal ambiguities with regard to “new digital laws”. According to observers, this probably meant the double package of the Digital Services Act (DSA) and the Digital Markets Act (DMA).
Zuckerberg hopes to have over a billion users
According to the latest figures from autumn, Threads had around 100 million monthly active users – still excluding the EU states. Facebook founder and Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg emphasizes that he sees potential for a service focused on public discourse with more than a billion users. However, Threads is different in many ways than 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 the place to feel the pulse of the world.
Meta’s German According to market researchers, since Musk bought the short message service Twitter and renamed it X, the number of users of the online platform has been falling.
Migration as a result of the Musk takeover
Recently, the departure of large advertising customers has also accelerated. On the one hand, the trigger was that Musk supported a post that contained an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. Almost at the same time, hate speech researchers demonstrated how advertising from well-known brands could be displayed next to Nazi posts. X claimed that the researchers manipulated the platform to achieve their desired outcome.
Musk apologized for his X post and said it had been misunderstood. But many major advertisers’ patience ran out and they continued to keep their ads off the platform. Musk then insulted advertisers in a public appearance and accused them of causing the platform to fail.
Advertisers are looking for X alternative
Musk, the richest person in the world, paid around $44 billion for Twitter in October 2022. Even before the recent exodus of advertising customers, X’s advertising revenue was, according to him, only half as high as it was during the Twitter era. Musk is relying more heavily on subscription revenue – but according to experts’ calculations, this revenue has 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 sales of $2.5 billion this year. In 2021 it was more than five billion dollars.
Several competitors see the opportunity to build on Twitter’s former importance with alternatives. Threads is considered a particularly strong candidate thanks to Instagram as a basis. Other competitors such as Mastodon and Bluesky are still significantly smaller than X. Another challenger to X, first called T2 and then Pebble, has already gone out of business.