A large tech corporation launches a new social network with billions of subscribers. The business plans to make the new social network a success by leveraging the recognition and size of its current offerings. In doing so, it also intends to destroy a popular rival’s app.Think again if this sounds like Instagram’s new Threads app and its offensive against Twitter. In 2011, Google had just launched Google+, a social network that was meant to be its “Facebook killer.” More than 90 million customers of Google’s other products and services—including search—were introduced to the new website by Google, which also pushed it in front of many of its users who relied on it.But by 2018, Google+ has been consigned to history’s ash heap. Despite having a massive following, the internet search giant’s social network didn’t take off because users kept migrating to Facebook, then to Instagram and other social apps.Big tech businesses have frequently grown even bigger tech companies throughout Silicon Valley’s history by utilising their scale as an inherent advantage. However, as Google+ demonstrates, size alone does not ensure success in the erratic and faddish social media sector.This is the difficulty that Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, is currently facing as he attempts to unseat Twitter and establish Threads as the leading platform for in-context, public talks. If the history of technology is any indication, scale and size are good starting points but eventually have their limits.The next step is much more difficult. Zuckerberg wants individuals to be able to discover friends and influencers on Threads in the same random and occasionally bizarre ways that Twitter does. He must make sure that spam and swindlers are not abundant on Threads. He wants users to be patient as he works on app improvements.In other words, he needs users to find Threads intriguing enough to return frequently.”If you launch a gimmick app or something that isn’t fully featured quite yet, it might be counterproductive and you could see a lot of people churn right back out of the door,” said Eric Seufert, a private mobile analyst who regularly monitors Meta’s apps.Threads currently seems to have achieved overnight success. On July 5, Zuckerberg claimed that 10 million individuals had downloaded Threads within hours of its release. That number rose to 100 million on Monday. It was the first programme to achieve this within that time frame, surpassing the chatbot ChatGPT, which, according to analytics company Similarweb, racked up 100 million users in just two months after its launch.
The revenue that Threads had generated was described by Seufert as “objectively impressive and unprecedented.”
