In a quarterly earning call, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently stated the obvious: the dramatic ongoing downfall of Twitter/X helped the explosive growth of the new Threads app.
He talked about how the company beat revenue estimates this quarter, per Deadline, but thankfully he focused on business, and didn’t mention the much-talked-about cage match between fellow billionaire and rival Elon Musk, who owns Twitter.
“It could be that this is such an idiosyncratic [situation] because of all the factors that were happening around Twitter, or X, as I guess it is called now. So it is hard to say. When something works or doesn’t, you can often point to the reason why it did or didn’t, and I think there is an interesting intellectual question of whether you could have known that.”
Threads has been explosively popular, but some reports say engagement has fallen by 70% more recently due to the lack of features on the nascent site.
“We have a lot of work to do to really make Threads reach its full potential. That’s not a foregone conclusion yet, even though I think we’re off to a great start,” Zuckerberg said.
He added that he felt optimistic that over time the app would reach its full potential.
“We have a basic playbook here, which is build an experience. It’s got to be something that people like. So it has to have a product market fit. Once you get that, it’s not always retentive, so a lot of people might like the experience but you need to kind of tune it.”
Zuckerberg said he feels like the company is “getting to a good place on that” and that he’s “highly confident that we are going to be able to pour enough gasoline on this to help it grow.”
Once the app reaches “hundreds of millions of people” he said, then he’ll “worry about monetization.” He is confident in the app, though.
“I do think it has been this weird, anomalous thing in the tech industry, that there hasn’t been an app for public discussions like this that has reached a billion people. When I look at all the different social experiences, it just seems like there should be one like this.”
As for Twitter, it’s been hemorrhaging users since Musk took over. He’s introduced a number of controversial features in an attempt to monetize users, and it’s caused all kinds of issues. The truth is we’re probably going to see a lot of changes with both apps, and which one comes out on top remains to be seen.