In the five days since its launch, Meta's Threads has surpassed 100 million users, beating a record previously held by ChatGPT to become the fast-growing online platform in history (the AI chatbot did it in two months).
The strength of this launch has positioned Threads as a real potential rival to Elon Musk's Twitter, which clocked around 240 million monetizable daily active users as of July 2022, the last public filing before Musk's takeover. Data-tracking websites have more recently noted decreases in Twitter's traffic over the past few months, with Similarweb saying that on July 6 and 7, Twitter traffic was down 11% year-over-year.
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Ark Invest -- which has long supported Tesla CEO Elon Musk -- said in a Monday note that Threads "could become a powerful competitor to Twitter," noting not just its fast growth in users, but also its sizeable engagement; the platform boasted some 95 million Threads garnering nearly 200 million likes in its first day.
"While Meta deserves accolades for the most successful online platform launch in history, time will tell whether Threads will be a replay of Stories’ success against Snapchat or Reels’ relegation to a stepchild of Tiktok," Ark's associate portfolio manager Nick Grous wrote. "Leveraging Instagram’s infrastructure and social graphs with a slick interface and hints of decentralization, at the same time that Twitter was facing criticism for limiting activity to surface and eliminate bots, could prove brilliant as a go-to-market strategy."
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Grous noted, however, that it is still too early to dub Threads the "Twitter Killer."
"The battle has just begun," he said.
Ark owns a total of 178,149 shares of (META) -), spread across its Innovation and Next Generation Internet ETFs. Meta's stock hit a 52-week high of $298.13 on Monday, before falling to around $290.
