Threads Shoots Past One Million User Mark at Lightning Speed

According to information from Meta itself, the company's new Threads app has registered two million users in the first two hours after its launch Wednesday. The product that is seen as a competitor to Twitter supports posts up to 500 characters, photos and videos up to five minutes and was called a place for "friendly" conversations by its makers. This approach is supported by fact checkers and the flagging and blocking of post detected as false or misleading by Threads. Twitter threatened to sue Meta over the hiring of former employees for the app.

Threads is now likely the most rapidly downloaded app or rapidly adopted online service, taking the crown from AI tool ChatGPT, which gained one million users five days after launching in November of last year.

Other popular online services have generally taken much longer to hit the one million user mark. Instagram is among those which come the closest. The popular social media service achieved one million users in just 2.5 months, albeit measured via downloads of the app. Spotify and Dropbox also achieved the feat quickly - in five and seven months, respectively, being services that like ChatGPT offer an immediate practical use. Apart from Instagram, social media services usually took a bit longer to gain one million users. However, the ones included in the chart were also founded more than 15 years ago, showing another development that can be gleaned from the data: As the internet became more omnipresent over time, online services were also able to attain users faster.

When Netflix was launched as a subscription service in 1999, the one million user mark was still 3.5 years away for the streaming and back then, movie mailorder service.