Tech billionaires Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk have been joking about setting up a cage match. In the business world, the fight has already begun.
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| Threads - Twitter |
Less than a day after Mr Zuckerberg launched his alternative to Twitter, Threads, it had already claimed some some 30 million sign-ups - lending it credibility as a serious contender in the world of social media.
That's still a small fraction of the hundreds of millions of Twitter users.
But analysts think it's a sign that Mr Zuckerberg's Meta has a good shot at wooing some of its gigantic 3 billion-plus users on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp to the new offering - and bringing advertisers with them. After all, Mr Zuckerberg, whose Meta made more than $117bn in sales last year, has a monster track record when it comes to selling adverts - and none of the apparent qualms of Mr Musk, who has disdained advertising at his electric car company, Tesla, and been looking for alternative ways to fund Twitter.
Mr Zuckerberg said there would be no ads on Threads initially, giving the company time to fine-tune the app, which allows users to scroll endlessly through text-based posts.
"Our approach will be the same as all our other products: make the product work well first, then see if we can get it on a clear path to 1 billion people, and only then think about monetization at that point," he wrote.
But eventually, Threads adverts could add 1% to 5% to Meta's overall revenue, generating more than $6bn in the most optimistic scenario, Justin Patterson, equity research analyst at KeyBanc Capital Markets wrote in a note. That's not huge. But it's also not nothing, especially as the company continues to look for ways to combat the hit to ad sales sparked by stricter privacy rules from Apple.
Source: bbc