This is an excerpt from Alex Heath’s Sources, a newsletter about AI and the tech industry that is syndicated to The Verge subscribers only once a week.
By all measures, Meta’s Threads app has had a great year. The app was Apple’s second most downloaded iOS app of the year, trailing only ChatGPT. Threads now has 400 million monthly and 150 million daily active users.
“There are consumers who are eager to consume content.”
That growth is still primarily coming from Meta’s other platforms. “We do a lot of work on Instagram and Facebook to show what’s going on in Threads,” Connor Hayes, head of Threads, told me this week. Playbook: Displays personalized thread content in your Instagram and Facebook feeds, lets you download the app, then relieves you of the need for those prompts to constantly check it. “We do a lot of things to keep people from becoming dependent on those promotions and just waking up in the morning and wanting to open the app,” Hayes said.
Hayes, who initially helped launch Threads and was named its head in September, has focused on clarifying the platform’s identity. In our conversation, he said the goal of Threads is “to create a place on the Internet to talk about what’s going on in the world.” In practical terms, that means going vertical by vertical – sports, entertainment, news – and getting both creators and consumers to use the app more.
When it comes to competitors, Hayes focuses on more than just the X. “Reddit has a lot of activity that is consistent with what happened on Twitter in the early days,” he said. “Discord has a bunch of these big group chat-style communities.” He acknowledged Twitter, now X, as “the app that pioneered the mainstream format”, but clarified that the real-time conversation battle is crowded.
A traffic channel for creators
There is no direct monetization for creators on Threads right now. Hayes is offering something different: threads as a traffic channel to other platforms where creators actually get paid.
The most obvious example is podcasts. Threads recently launched a feature that presents show and episode links from platforms like Spotify and lets users pin them to their profiles. Hayes said Threads is also open to other partnerships with platforms like Substack and Patreon. But there are no plans to pay creators to post content directly on threads or share ad revenue like YouTube does.
Ads are coming, but slowly
Meanwhile, Threads is testing ads in four countries, including the US, but the load is intentionally light, Hayes told me. “We’re continuing to increase the ad load over the course of the next year,” he said, “but only doing so if we feel there’s enough value on the consumer side of the app to justify doing so.”
controlling algorithm
Threads is testing a new feature called “Dear Algo” in some countries. Users can ask to see more or less of a topic, share their algorithm prompts for others to use or remix, and adjust their personalized feed to the prompt for up to three days. “After your sports team’s heartbreaking loss, you can be like, don’t show me NFL stuff for three days,” Hayes said. “But you’ll be ready to come back on the fourth day.”
Broader point: The understanding of the material has become better thanks to the LLM. “Now we don’t know that it’s about basketball. We know that it’s the 1998 NBA Finals, and this player is taking shots for this team.” That precision is what makes this type of algorithmic steering possible. Hayes has been surprised by how specific early user requests have been, with prompts like, “Show me more football content, but not Patrick Mahomes.”
Fediverse is on maintenance mode
Threads still supports federation with other apps like Mastodon, but Hayes was clear that it’s not a top priority for the current roadmap. “It’s something we’re supporting, it’s something we’re maintaining, but it’s not the thing we’re talking about that will help the app spread,” he said.
“As someone who has created a billion consumer products, it’s really hard to keep these different platforms and products consistent on the same protocol over time,” he explained. “There are always trade-offs that these companies are thinking about about how much energy do I want to put into compatibility with this ecosystem versus iterating on this thing that I’m building and seeing what’s valuable.”
Prioritizing timeliness but not news
Threads were made joking about how this would bring up old content. According to Hayes, the app now prioritizes recommendations of content from the last 24 hours. “If something is four or five days old, even if it’s really good, we probably won’t show it.”
Unlike X, Hayes said Threads is not making any efforts to bring more journalists and publishers to the app. “We look at it just like any other vertical, which means there are some creators who are really good at it and know a lot about it. There are consumers who are eager to consume content.” He said Threads is not ranking news lower, but it is “not one of the focus verticals right now.”
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