The Twitter successor faces competition in Europe: Threads is now also available here in the country. With the launch in the EU, Meta, the social network behind the short messaging service, aims to strengthen its presence in the market. With 450 million people, the EU is a significant market and advertising space.
Threads is closely related to Elon Musk's former service X, but presents important differences. Despite the high demand from users at its launch in July and its tight integration with Meta's photo network Instagram, concrete success figures for Threads remain unknown so far. However, the European launch could change this.
The reason for the delay in Europe were unresolved regulatory issues. The Digital Markets Act, among other things, complicates the integration of data from different services, directly affecting Meta's business model. To circumvent this, content in threads can also be viewed without logging in, while posting requires a user profile. Deletion of the threads account is also possible without deleting the Instagram account.
The messaging service is closely connected to photos and videos from Instagram and is similar in features and design to the text-heavy X. However, posts on threads can be much longer - up to 500 characters - and can also include links, photos, and videos up to five minutes in length. So far, about 61 percent of threads users are male, the majority of whom are between the ages of 25 and 34. The preferred age group of 18 to 24-year-old advertising customers, however, is underrepresented at 14.5 percent.
Analysts see Threads as an attempt by Metas to exploit the issues of X and attract more users. However, previous experiences from other countries show that users have not switched to Threads in droves, partly due to the lack of chronological sorting of posts. Another factor is that Threads does not want to operate solely as a messaging service, but rather aims to entertain.
This lack of a precise identity and differentiation harms the platform. For Meta, the most important factors are the reach and engagement of users, as they want to avoid "negativity" such as political and factual content. According to analysts, the success of X heavily depends on owner Elon Musk's behavior. In order to retain advertising clients and users, Musk must better monitor the content on the microblogging service. However, it doesn't seem like Musk is following this advice so far.
No advertising is currently being displayed on Threads, but this will change in the coming months. Analysts believe that Meta, similar to Instagram and Facebook, will offer paid versions without advertising in the future. Currently, users already have to pay for the ad-free versions of Meta Verified.
