Meta aims to introduce advertisements on Threads, its text-based social media platform, from early 2025, according to a report by The Information.
Threads is reportedly set to allow a small number of marketers post and produce advertising material from January. Leading the effort in is early stages is a team inside Instagram’s advertising division.
Instagram head Adam Mosseri has also confirmed the news.
“We definitely plan to bring ads to Threads. I get why people have concerns, but at the end of the day we’re a business and Threads needs to make enough money to pay for the people and servers that it takes to run the service and provide it to people for free,” he said on a post.
Threads app was launched in July last year as a competition to X, formerly Twitter, in a bid to win users away from the site during its chaotic and controversy-filled takeover by billionaire Elon Musk.
The app has now hit 275 million monthly active users, which Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg believes is a sign of its rapid and significant growth.
However, Meta does not expect Threads to be “a meaningful driver of 2025 revenue,” CFO Susan Li said during a post-earnings call in October. She also confirmed that the company is reportedly planning to introduce more features on its app to cater to more users.
Threads stands a likely positive chance of attracting advertisers away from X, which has experienced a slump in ad revenue following Elon Musk’s divisive takeover. Namely, in August, Musk sued a global advertising alliance and several major companies, including Mars and CVS Health, of unlawfully conspiring to boycott the site. On the other hand, a recent report from The Financial Times has claimed that some advertisers seek to head back to X and earn favor from Musk.
Apart from launching advertising on Threads, Meta has also been heavily investing in artificial intelligence (AI) and augmented reality (AR) and will likely continue to do so in 2025.
