Meta’s Threads opens up ads to global advertisers

Months after first testing ads in select markets, including the U.S., Meta on Wednesday announced that its Instagram Threads app would now expand ads to all advertisers worldwide. The expansion will allow eligible advertisers to reach Threads’ over 320 million monthly active users, and it will include access to an inventory filter to control the sensitivity level of content next to which the ads run.

The company says that the new ad placement within the Threads feed will be switched on by default for all new ad campaigns that use either Meta’s Advantage+ or Manual Placements. However, advertisers on the latter plan will have the option to opt out of the Threads feed.

Meta notes that the ads themselves will only be delivered in select markets at launch and will roll out to more markets over time.

To date, Threads has been testing ads in the U.S. and Japan.

The expansion signals that Meta thinks that the Threads community is now robust enough to monetize and compete for advertiser dollars against its top rival, Elon Musk’s X. What’s more, Meta thinks its platform is more advertiser-friendly, as three out of four Threads users already follow at least one business on the app, it says.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told investors on the company’s most recent earnings call in January that he expects Threads to reach more than 1 billion people over the next “several years.” He also noted that the network had been adding “more than 1 million signups per day.”

However, the Threads app itself didn’t entirely grow organically. Instead, it benefited from the network effects of being connected to Instagram, building on Instagram’s existing friend graph when onboarding new users. That made Threads nearly instantly function as an extension of users’ Instagram networks, where they could follow a similar set of friends, creators, and brands as before.

That competitive edge, built on the base of owning and operating some of the world’s biggest social networks, is something Meta is now defending in its antitrust trial with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. The trial could ultimately result in Meta being forced to sell off Instagram and WhatsApp, if the government’s prosecution is successful.

To help grow Threads, Meta has borrowed concepts from emerging social networks like Mastodon and Bluesky.

Like Mastodon, Meta is integrating its app with the ActivityPub protocol, which connects Threads to a wider, decentralized open web known as the fediverse. Though that integration has yet to complete, Threads could one day easily become the largest service operating in the fediverse as a result, dwarfing Mastodon’s 8+ million registered users and its under 1 million monthly actives.

In total, the fediverse today (not including Threads) has north of 16 million users.

Threads has also copied some of Bluesky’s more popular features, including the ability to create custom feeds outside of the default algorithmic feed, and introduced its own take on Bluesky’s Starter Packs, offering curated lists of recommended users for newcomers to follow.

Unlike Bluesky, which now has over 35 million users, Threads users are still defaulted to Threads’ “For You” feed when they launch the app. They also don’t have the option to control their own moderation preferences, as Bluesky users do.