What Is Meta Threads and How Does It Compare to X

Threads is Meta's text app. It launched on 5 July 2023, it now has 500 million people using it every month, and since September 2025 more people have opened it each day than have opened X. This article checks whether that size turns into anything a business can use, using Meta's own earnings transcripts, a study of 39,762,999 posts, and publisher traffic measured across 565 news sites.

Threads is Meta's text app and you sign in with your Instagram account

Threads is the fourth big app Meta runs, after Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. It was built by the Instagram team, and the date it launched was not a coincidence. On 1 July 2023 Twitter put a daily cap on how many posts each person was allowed to read, set at 600 posts for a free account and 6,000 for a paying one. People hit that cap within hours and then saw an error message instead of any more posts. Meta launched Threads four days later, on 5 July 2023.

• A Threads post is 500 characters of text, and you can attach up to 20 photos or videos to it.
• You cannot make a Threads account on its own, because signing up requires an existing Instagram account. Your Instagram username and your follower list come with you.
• Threads gives you two feeds, one called "For You" that Meta fills with posts from strangers and one called "Following" that shows only accounts you follow.
• Threads is free to post on, free to read, and it has no paid tier at all, unlike X where reach is sold as a subscription.
• Threads is blocked in Iran, China and Russia, and it took Meta until 14 December 2023 to launch in the European Union.
• Threads posts can appear on Instagram and Facebook unless you turn that off, which is a large part of why the app grew so fast.

Threads has 500 million monthly users and it took Meta three years to get there

Every number below is Mark Zuckerberg or Adam Mosseri speaking, on an earnings call or in a post. Nobody has to estimate this part.

• Threads got 100 million sign-ups in its first five days, which was the fastest an app had ever been installed at the time. Sign-ups, not people who stayed.
• Threads had just under 100 million people using it each month by October 2023, so roughly the whole launch crowd had to be won back a second time.
• Threads reached 200 million monthly users in July 2024, 300 million in December 2024 and 400 million in August 2025.
• Threads crossed 500 million monthly users on 16 June 2026, and Zuckerberg called it "the fastest growing conversation app ever" the following month.
• Meta has published a Threads daily user number exactly twice, 100 million in December 2024 and 150 million in October 2025.
• The figure of 450 million monthly users that appears on dozens of statistics sites was never said by Meta, which went straight from 400 million to 500 million.

More people open the Threads phone app each day than open the X phone app

This is one specific measurement and it is worth being precise about it, because it gets reported as "Threads is bigger than X" and it does not mean that. Similarweb estimates how many separate people tap each app open on an average day, anywhere in the world. It covers phones only, it does not cover the website, and it does not care whether the person stayed for four seconds or forty minutes. It is an estimate rather than a head count, and the next section but one explains why that matters.

• Threads overtook X on daily phone app opens worldwide in September 2025, by a margin of about 100,000 people, which is 0.08%.
• October 2025 was the first full month Threads led, at 128.2 million daily app opens against X's 124.7 million.
• Threads reached 147 million daily app opens in July 2026 while X fell to 123.7 million.
• X has lost about 17% of its daily app opens over 21 months, falling from 148.5 million in October 2024.
• Threads has never led in the United States, where X had 21.3 million daily app opens against Threads' 18.3 million in April 2026.

Threads winning on app opens does not make it bigger than X, because X is also used in browsers

The obvious next thought is that almost everybody uses a phone, so winning on phones should settle it. It does not, and here is the part that gets left out of the headline.

• X gets about 145 million visits a day to x.com in a web browser, against about 8.5 million a day to threads.com.
• Threads is a phone app with a website bolted on, and X is used heavily in a browser on desktop computers as well as on phones.
• Threads users spend about 5 minutes a day in the app and X users spend about 32, so the same number of app opens is not the same amount of use.
• Threads users open the app 1.9 times a day and X users open it 6.9 times, so one app open is not one visit either.
• Only 8% of American adults use Threads against 21% for X, so Threads has not passed X in the market most advertisers pay for.
• Nobody can say which app has more total users, because neither Meta nor X publishes a figure the other one can be measured against.

Threads users spend 5 minutes a day in the app and X users spend 32

Two measurement firms have checked this a year apart and both got the same shape of answer.

• Threads users spend about 5 minutes a day in the app and X users spend about 32 minutes, measured by Similarweb in April 2026.
• Threads users open the app 1.9 times a day and X users open it 6.9 times.
• Only 29.9% of people with a Threads account open it on any given day, against 42.4% of people with an X account.
• Sensor Tower measured the same gap in mid 2025, at 8 minutes a day on Threads against 31 minutes on X.
• Meta has never published how long people spend on Threads, and reports only percentage rises such as "a 20% lift in Threads time spent" in late 2025.
• A five minute daily visit is why a Threads post stops being seen quickly, and it is the single biggest limit on the app.

Threads is still growing but its daily user growth fell from 127% a year to 21%

Threads is still growing on every number Meta reports. The rate it is growing at has fallen by roughly six times in a little over a year.

• Daily Threads app opens grew 127.8% in the year to June 2025, then 48% to October 2025, then 37.8% to January 2026, then 21.3% to July 2026.
• Meta added 75 million monthly users to Threads in the third quarter of 2024, which is still the best quarter it has ever had.
• Meta has added about 30 million monthly users a quarter since August 2025, which is about 40% of that peak rate.
• Meta told investors Threads was gaining "more than 1 million sign-ups per day" in late 2024 and has not repeated the claim since.
• Meta gave no Threads user number at all across three consecutive earnings calls between August 2025 and June 2026.

Comscore says Threads is losing US users while Similarweb says it is gaining them

This is worth knowing before you trust any single Threads statistic. Two respected firms estimated the American audience over almost the same period and got opposite answers. Neither figure is a head count: both firms watch a sample of volunteers and then scale that sample up to the size of the country.

• Comscore estimated 12.5 million Americans used Threads in June 2025 and 7.1 million in March 2026, a fall of 43%.
• Similarweb estimated 15.3 million Americans opened the Threads phone app daily in June 2025 and 18.3 million in April 2026, a rise.
• Comscore's figure for a whole month is smaller than Similarweb's figure for a single day, which cannot be true of one group of people, so the two are not measuring the same thing.
• Similarweb's phone data is much stronger on Android than on iPhone, so an app whose users lean toward iPhone is the kind of app its model can get wrong.
• Comscore's 7.1 million for a whole month is well below the 24.6 million American Threads accounts that Meta's own advertising tools say can be reached.
• Nobody has published any measurement of how many Threads accounts are fake or automated, so neither firm's figure can be corrected for them.

A Pew survey sits between Comscore and Similarweb and makes both of them look wrong

Pew Research Center does not model anything. It picks Americans at random, asks them, and publishes the sample size. It ran the question twice in 2025, on 5,022 people and then on 5,153, and got 8% both times. That gives a third number to check the other two against.

• 8% of American adults use Threads, which is about 21 million people on the adult population Pew surveys.
• Comscore's 7.1 million for a whole month is about a third of Pew's figure, so Comscore looks too low.
• Similarweb's 18.3 million for a single day is 87% of Pew's figure, so almost every American who has ever used Threads would have to open it daily.
• Similarweb's own figure for how many Threads users open the app on a given day is 29.9%, which contradicts its own American number.
• Working backwards from those two Similarweb figures gives 61 million Americans with Threads, which is 2.9 times what Pew found and 2.5 times what Meta's own advertising tools report.
• The one probability survey outside America points down, because Ofcom found Threads fell from 5.3 million British adults in July 2024 to 4.3 million in May 2025.

A brand new account gets 5.9 times more views per post on Threads than on X

Metricool analysed 39,762,999 posts from 1,059,949 accounts across ten platforms during 2025, and split the results by how many followers each account had. This is the table that matters if nobody knows who you are yet.

• An account with 0 to 2,000 followers averaged 761.31 views per post on Threads and 128.82 views per post on X. That is 5.9 times more.
• The same account size averaged 8.15 interactions per post on Threads and 1.67 on X, which is 4.9 times more.
• Threads came second out of eight platforms on views for accounts under 2,000 followers, behind only TikTok at 2,245.58.
• X came seventh out of eight on the same measure, ahead of only YouTube.
• Accounts under 2,000 followers were the only group on X that lost on both measures during 2025, with interactions down 15% and views down 22%.

X beats Threads on views once you have followers, so Threads only wins for beginners

Read the previous section and this one together, because a single average for each platform hides the whole story.

• Across accounts of every size, the average X post got 2,711.39 views in 2025 and the average Threads post got 1,536.09. X wins by 77%.
• For accounts with 0 to 2,000 followers, that ordering reverses completely and Threads wins by 5.9 times.
• An account with 100,000 to 1 million followers got 4,212.22 views per post on Threads and 4,598.58 on X, so Threads is 8% behind at that size.
• An account with over 1 million followers got 83,373.73 views per post on Threads and 12,031.10 on X, so Threads is 593% ahead at that size.
• X's high overall average comes from its middle sized accounts, whose views rose 9% and interactions rose 68% during 2025.
• Buffer found the same shape in a different dataset, where the typical post on X, Threads and Bluesky all got exactly 4 interactions while the average X post got 328.

A brand new YouTube channel gets 107 views a video, the worst of the eight platforms measured

YouTube is the platform most often recommended to businesses starting from nothing. On the measured numbers, it is the hardest place to start.

• A YouTube channel with under 2,000 subscribers averaged 107.77 views per video in 2025, the lowest figure of the eight platforms Metricool measured.
• The same channels averaged 1.18 interactions per video, which is also last place.
• Only 11% of YouTube channels with fewer than 10,000 subscribers gained enough subscribers to move up a tier in the year to February 2026.
• YouTube pays back the effort later, because 84% of American adults use it and its videos keep collecting views for days.
• The 70% of watch time that comes from YouTube's recommendations was said once by a YouTube executive in January 2018 and has never been restated.

Use Repeat Recorder to rehearse a video post before you put it on Threads

Video is the format with the highest engagement on Threads, and it is also the one most people avoid because they hate hearing themselves. Repeat Recorder, one of my own apps, was built for exactly that problem: it records you, then plays the clip back on a loop so you can hear the same twenty seconds over and over until the wording stops sounding wrong.

• Repeat Recorder loops a recording back hands free, so you can practise the same line while your phone stays on the table.
• A Threads post allows 500 characters, which is about fifteen seconds of speech, so a video post is short enough to rehearse properly.
• Recordings stay on your phone and are never uploaded, shared or used to train anything.

Half of a tweet's views arrive in 80 minutes and half of a YouTube video's in 9.67 days

Three researchers measured 21,685 tweets to find out how long a post keeps being seen. A separate analysis of more than 5 million posts did the same across every platform.

• Half of all the views a tweet will ever get arrive within about 80 minutes of posting it.
• The busiest single second for a tweet is 72 seconds after it is sent.
• About 95% of tweets get no meaningful views at all after their first 24 hours.
• A YouTube video takes 9.67 days to collect half of its engagement, which is 284 times as long as a tweet's 49 minutes on the same measure.
• 83% of a YouTube video's interactions still arrive in its first 10 days, so "YouTube videos earn forever" is an exaggeration.
• Nobody has ever measured how long a Threads post keeps getting views, so there is no honest number to give you.

Threads sends less than 0.1% of the traffic that arrives at news websites

Be clear about what is and is not happening here, because this gets reported as though Threads blocks links. It does not. You can put a web address in a Threads post or in a reply, it turns into a normal clickable link, and anyone can tap it. Chartbeat measures where visitors to news sites actually arrive from, across hundreds of publishers, and almost none of them arrive from Threads.

• Links work normally on Threads, in the post itself and in replies, and Meta blocks nothing.
• Threads still accounts for under 0.1% of all the traffic arriving at the news sites Chartbeat measures.
• Threads sent 24.5 million clicks out to other websites in November 2024, and 42% of those went to instagram.com rather than to anyone's own site.
• Bluesky sent 38.6 million clicks in the same month, from an audience roughly a fortieth of the size.
• Adam Mosseri said in November 2024 that Threads does not push links down, but that it places little value on whether a reader will click one.
• So a post with a link is shown to fewer people in the first place, and that is where the clicks are lost, not at the link itself.

X is not much better on this. Its referrals to 486 small news sites fell from 10.1 million page views in April 2018 to 186,930 in April 2023, a fall of 98%, and the average post on X produced 7 link clicks in 2025.

Meta cut the share of your Threads reach that comes from strangers, on purpose

Threads spent its first year showing people a feed made almost entirely of accounts they did not follow. Meta then changed its mind and said so plainly.

• Adam Mosseri announced on 21 November 2024 that Meta was rebalancing Threads to show more posts from accounts you already follow.
• He told creators to expect what he called "unconnected reach", meaning views from people who do not follow you, to go down.
• X moved the other way and says its For You feed is about half accounts you follow and half accounts you do not.
• Nobody has published what share of a Threads post's views now come from strangers, so the size of the cut is unknown.
• The 2025 numbers still show a new Threads account beating a new X account by 5.9 times, so the cut did not undo the advantage.

Use Camera to Clipboard to get a photo off your phone and into a Threads post

Threads is a phone app, but the web version is where most people actually write, because typing is faster on a keyboard. That leaves the everyday annoyance of the picture being on your phone and the post being on your computer. Camera to Clipboard, another of my own apps, removes it: you photograph something on your phone and the picture lands straight on your computer's clipboard, ready to paste.

• Camera to Clipboard sends the photo straight to your computer's clipboard, so there is no emailing a picture to yourself.
• 4.55% of the people who see a photo post on Threads react to it against 2.79% for a plain text post, so the picture is worth the trouble.
• You can attach up to 20 photos to a single Threads post, which is more than most people realise.

Threads pays creators nothing and the one bonus program ended with no announcement

If you are choosing where to put your effort, it is worth knowing which platforms pay you back directly. Threads is not one of them.

• Threads has no creator fund, no revenue share, no tipping and no subscriptions as of August 2026.
• The Threads Bonus Program paid invited American creators between 500 and 5,000 US dollars a month, and required at least 2,500 views on a post.
• Payments stopped around the end of April 2025, and Meta never announced the end or explained it.
• Meta paid Facebook creators nearly 3 billion US dollars in 2025, a 35% rise on the year before.
• X pays creators out of a pool of up to 25% of its subscription revenue, which is small but is not zero.

Only 8% of American adults use Threads and only 3% get news there

Pew Research Center surveyed 5,022 American adults between February and June 2025, then a separate 5,153 in August 2025. Both surveys returned the same Threads figure.

• 8% of American adults use Threads, against 21% for X, 50% for Instagram and 84% for YouTube.
• 3% of American adults regularly get news on Threads, against 12% on X and 38% on Facebook.
• 34% of Threads users regularly get news there, against 57% of X users, so Threads is far less of a news app.
• Threads is opened by more people each day than X worldwide and has about a quarter of X's role in how Americans follow news.
• 18% of Black American adults use Threads against 6% of White American adults, the widest racial gap of any platform Pew measured.
• Threads news readers are 61% Democrat or Democrat leaning while X news readers are 56% Republican or Republican leaning.

Threads is the one text app where women outnumber men, and India is why it looks male

Almost every article about Threads reports that its audience is about 58% male. That figure is real and it is also close to useless, because one country creates it.

• India is Threads' largest market by advertising reach and its Threads audience is 75.3% male.
• The United States is 49.4% male on Threads, so it is essentially an even split.
• Japan is 57.1% female on Threads, the most female audience of any country Meta publishes.
• Pew found 9% of American women and 8% of American men use Threads, the only one of Threads, X, Bluesky and Truth Social where women lead.
• Among Americans who get news on Threads, 58% are women and 39% are men, while on X it is 32% women and 67% men.
• The single largest Threads age group worldwide is 25 to 34 at 28.75%, measured on web visitors only, who are about 6% of the audience.

Threads reaches a third of Taiwan's adults, a higher share than any other country

Threads is not evenly spread. In a handful of places it is a mainstream app, and in most of the world it is a minor one.

• Threads reaches 33.5% of adults in Taiwan and 23.2% of adults in Hong Kong, the two highest shares Meta publishes.
• Threads reaches 1.8% of India's population, and India still has four times Taiwan's total Threads audience.
• Japan is Threads' third largest market at 13.0 million people, and Meta picked Japan as one of only two countries to test Threads ads in.
• Meta's Japan office said in July 2026 that time spent on Threads in Japan had grown 2.3 times in a year.
• The country figures Meta publishes cover 23 countries and leave out Brazil, Britain, Germany and most of Europe entirely.
• Those 23 published countries add up to about 130 million people against a claimed 500 million monthly users, so the list is nowhere near complete.

Threads and X and YouTube compared on everything a business actually cares about

Green is the best of the three, red is the worst, and every number has its source and date in the section above it.

What you get from Threads is followers, replies and direct messages, not website visits

If Threads will not send people to your website, the fair question is what it gives you instead. Here is the whole answer. Three things you get, one thing you do not, and one thing nobody has ever measured.

• You get strangers seeing your post, at 761 views for an account under 2,000 followers against 129 for the same size account on X.
• You get replies, and replying back to them raised engagement 42% on Threads, more than on any other platform measured.
• You get followers on Threads, and Meta said in April 2025 that three out of four Threads users already follow at least one business on the app.
• You get private messages, because Threads carries about 350 million direct messages a week and a reader can message you straight from your post.
• You get almost no visits to your website, because Threads sends under 0.1% of the traffic arriving at news sites, even though its links work perfectly well.
• Nobody has ever published how fast a typical Threads account gains followers, so the one number a business most wants does not exist.

So Threads is a place to be found by people who do not know you, and then to be talked to. Whatever you want to happen after that has to happen somewhere else, because Threads is the weakest of the big platforms at sending a reader anywhere.

Conclusion: what Meta Threads is and how it compares to X, in one glance

Threads is Meta's text app, more people open it each day than open X, and what it gives a business is followers, replies and direct messages rather than visits to a website. These five points are ordered by how large the measured gap is.

• A post from an account under 2,000 followers gets 761 views on Threads and 129 on X.
• A Threads user spends 5 minutes a day in the app and an X user spends 32, so a Threads post has a much shorter life.
• Threads sends under 0.1% of the traffic arriving at news sites, so it is the wrong tool for getting clicks to a website.
• Threads has paid creators nothing since April 2025, so it is the wrong place to expect the platform itself to pay you.
• Only 8% of American adults use Threads, so a large global number does not mean your own customers are there.

Companion pieces