Finally: ads on Threads. How will the value compare to X or Twitter?

Hell has frozen over, Marvel and DC are going to combine their cinematic universes, and the Democrats and Republicans are forming a giant new super-party in the U.S. Actually not, of course, but 19 long months after Meta launched Threads to the world, the text-focused social network is finally starting to test ads. Very shortly, there will be ads on Threads.

Via Adam Mosseri, who leads Instagram and Threads, posted this on the platform just an hour ago:

“We’re starting a small test for ads on Threads with a handful of brands in the US and Japan. We know there will be plenty of feedback about how we should approach ads, and we are making sure they feel like Threads posts you’d find relevant and interesting. We’ll closely monitor this test before scaling it more broadly, with the goal of getting ads on Threads to a place where they are as interesting as organic content.”

Threads launched on July 5, 2023 as part of a flurry of innovation in the more text-oriented social news network space after Elon Musk completed his takeover of Twitter and eventually rebranded it as X. With over 300 million monthly active users and over 100 million daily active users as of December 2024, Threads is by far the biggest of the “Twitter killer” cadre that includes Bluesky, Mastodon, and others.

Big enough to be significant in terms of ads.

Ads on Threads: what we know right now:

It’s early days, but here’s what Meta has announced so far about the ads on Threads:

• Small, limited early test
• U.S. and Japan only
• No new creative needed
• Ads are simple: image + text + link
• Ads will show a “sponsored” tag
• Uses Meta’s Ads Manager: just check a box
• Personalized to the content that people engage with
• Comes with an AI filter to screen what content your ads appear next to
• Third-party verification to come “in the coming months”

Here’s what they’ll look like, at least initially:

Again, it’s early days, but a bunch of things are obvious about the launch of ads on Threads:

1. Meta is going slow to get it right
2. Once Meta feels like they’ve gotten it right, the company has all the infrastructure and scale to massively ramp up
3. Meta is going to be able to make ads on Threads vastly more profitable than Twitter was able in the past, or X is able to now

But how much more valuable?

Ads on Threads: more valuable than X?

Twitter was never 1 of user acquisition managers’ favorite ad networks for scaled UA. 

It peaked in 2023, ranking on 14 indexes for various geos and genres in the Singular ROI Index. As X, it dropped but didn’t totally crater in 2024 to 12 rankings, but the subtext was that even on the indexes X still ranked on, it dropped down in comparison with other ad partners.

From last year’s ROI Index:

More telling, perhaps, is that where last year Twitter had quite a number of rankings in the top 5 of ad networks, such as global ROI on Android, global retention on Android, and regional retention in APAC and North America, this year X has zero rankings in the top 5 in any category.

Also in the 2024 Index, its share of ad spend among Singular customers dropped 38%.

So whether as Twitter or X, return on investment for ads has never been stellar, at least for mobile app marketers.

The unfortunate thing for Twitter is that its executive never saw the actual value in its SSP, MoPub, which they sold for just over $1 billion to AppLovin in 2022. MoPub, of course, got integrated into MAX and became a key part of what drove AppLovin’s ascent to a $100 billion ad giant. (When you see pricing on both the supply side and the demand side, you gain invaluable insight into what’s working.)

How will Threads be better?

The ad experience on Threads is likely to start at least somewhat similar to that on X. 

But Meta has a huge advantage over X: its vast trove of data on billions and billions of people, largely including the hundreds of millions on Threads. Because, after all, the only way to get an account on Threads for a significant amount of time after launching was to already have a Meta account on Instagram.

With 3 billion MAUs and 2.1 billion DAUs on Facebook plus billions more across Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger, Meta knows a lot about almost all of us. That includes what ads we click on, what topics we resonate with, and which people we engage with. 

And Meta will have a lot of crossover in usage between its various platforms. For example, I personally use Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp (occasionally), and Threads.

1. Facebook: 3.07 billion MAUs
2. WhatsApp: 2 billion MAUs
3. Instagram: 2 billion MAUs
4. Messenger: 1.01 billion
5. Threads: 300 million MAUs

That’s a lot of cross-over and triangulation about who I am, what I do, and where I spend money.

Plus, Meta has among the most mature ad management tools for advertisers on the planet, and it’s going to be a simple click to add Threads to the mix.

Add it all up, and Threads is almost guaranteed to have a better advertising experience — and results — than X. Whether it becomes yet another one of the Meta billion-user-platform services is anyone’s guess. But I wouldn’t bet against it in the long term.

The bigger question is going to be how Threads compares to ad experiences on core Meta platforms such as Facebook and Instagram. And how advertisers can use complementary campaigns on all of them to offer a surround-sound marketing experience. 

Plus, of course, whether Meta will pull a Google and offer a UAC/App Campaigns type of product where you give them your objective and (maybe) some art and copy, and they figure out all the rest, including where to place your ads.

One thing you know for sure: there’s going to be more AI everywhere in Meta’s solutions, and that probably includes advertising. Coincidentally, perhaps, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg also announced something today: a huge new investment in AI:

We’ll bring online ~1GW of compute in ’25 and we’ll end the year with more than 1.3 million GPUs. We’re planning to invest $60-65B in capex this year while also growing our AI teams significantly, and we have the capital to continue investing in the years ahead. This is a massive effort, and over the coming years it will drive our core products and business, unlock historic innovation, and extend American technology leadership. Let’s go build! 💪