The media is going nuts over the fact that Instagram Threads has reached 100 million users in just five days, making it far and away the fastest growing consumer product in history. It took previous record holder ChatGPT a sluggish two months to hit that mark. Child's play.
The magnitude of that number is undeniable. Conceptualizing that kind of growth is impossible and it's something that would only have been achievable in the last ten years. But even if it's unfathomable, I can't really say I'm all that surprised by it.
After all, Meta has in spades the single most important ingredient for quickly growing a new product: eyeballs. A captive audience. There's a reason when Apple launched Apple Music in 2015 that it sort of instantly became semi-successful: there are over a billion active iPhones in the world, and when you give a billion people the chance to do anything, all it takes is 1% of people to literally do something by mistake for a new product to have 10 million customers. It's sort of like how any stock Warren Buffet buys now will instantly shoot upwards simply on the news that Warren Buffet bought it: sometimes you just become so successful that you operate at a scale where you can all but call your own destiny in the short-term.
Instagram has over 2.3 billion monthly active users. All Instagram did was convert 1 in every 20 users to download threads. It's still a major accomplishment that they were able to do that, but when you're the size of Meta, your immediate success is dictated more by the law of big numbers than the law of big brains.
I don't see this as a major tick mark in the social media era. Meta is at best repackaging perhaps the most dated feature of Facebook — status updates — and calling it a new product. I don't see the smoke of a revolution on the horizon. But I do see this as a major tick mark in the history of Meta because it might represent the moment that Mark Zuckerberg gets his head out of his legless avatar's backside and remembers that his company is worth almost $800 billion because no company on the face of the planet is better at running social media platforms than Meta. This might be the kick he needed to refocus part of Meta's roadmap on continuing to flex this muscle.
Getting to 100 million users doesn't guarantee success though, and by almost all accounts, using Threads is a pretty unimpressive and sometimes unsatisfying experience. It might be a less toxic town square than Twitter for now but it's definitely not as functional of one, as the capabilities of Threads are pretty limited right now. But as I said before, the beauty in being a company the size of Meta is that you get to control your own destiny a bit more. Threads has the user base already built; now the ball is in Meta's court to make it an app people actually want to use before users get bored and delete it.
Will they be able to do that successfully? They have all the resources available to do it, but let's not be too confident in Meta yet. The only successful product they've ever organically built themselves rather than acquire is still just Facebook. We'll see if they can build, dare I say, two successful things.
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