Threads hits 500M monthly active users — head Connor Hayes explains the quiet app strategy and why it won't add a vertical video tab

Threads at 500M: The Quiet App Strategy

Threads has 500 million monthly active users, and Connor Hayes, Meta's VP leading the platform, says the more significant internal signal is where that growth is coming from. The share of new users arriving organically, without a Facebook or Instagram promotional push, has grown considerably over the past year. That shift is the metric Hayes says the team now organizes around, what they call "Threads-driven" growth.

Engagement data backs the direction. Time spent is up 130% year over year in Japan and 80% year over year in Korea, two of the largest ad markets in the world. Hayes frames the go-to-market playbook as deliberately sequential: pick a community or vertical, blitz it on both product and go-to-market simultaneously, then move to the next.

“We announced 500,000,000 monthlies today... The proportion of people that are coming to threads not from those promotions has been going up quite a bit in the last year... We're up like 130% year over year on time spent in Japan, 80% year over year in Korea. We launched ads globally four months ago and have just been slowly scaling it in line with the engagement going up.”

The "Quiet App" as competitive position

The platform's informal identity as the "quiet app" is a deliberate product choice, not an accident. In a landscape where nearly every feed defaults to sound-on vertical video, Threads offers text-first, scroll-and-read consumption. Hayes says he could increase time spent tomorrow by adding a vertical video tab, and he is not going to do it. The goal is to be the best app for public conversation, and that goal and raw time-spent metrics can pull in different directions.

The live second-screen bet extends that positioning. A live chat feature, used for NBA Finals coverage and a Lewis Hamilton Q&A with Ferrari fans, is designed to keep Threads quiet while other apps go loud around live events. Thousands of users can follow along, react, and ask questions without the app becoming a broadcast surface.

Advertising

Threads launched ads globally four months ago and is scaling cautiously. The monetization model is straightforward: advertisers running Instagram and Facebook campaigns can opt Threads in with a checkbox, routing existing demand to the new surface without a separate buying workflow. Hayes draws on the early Facebook feed as the proof point that text-forward formats can monetize efficiently, arguing the format itself was never the constraint for platforms that struggled to build strong ad businesses.

The near-term KPI for the ads team is impression depth, how many pieces of content a user sees per session, with the logic that more impressions create more opportunities to serve a relevant ad. Hayes acknowledges that conversational platforms carry a higher creative bar for ad copy, and expects AI-generated ad creative to work through images rather than text, since visual hooks tend to drive initial engagement on the feed.

Subscriptions are not a current priority. Meta's Instagram Pro subscription (priced at $3.99 per month) is a separate product Hayes views positively, but Threads has no plans to build its own subscription tier at this stage.

Team structure

Small, semi-autonomous pods of three or four people, mixing technical and creative skills, are responsible for the lighter feature work: music attachments, animated stickers, the spoiler text feature. Hayes says design talent is becoming more technical, which allows a single creative-minded person to build a feature end to end rather than requiring a designer-engineer handoff. He treats that category of work as a hits business, expecting most attempts not to land and structuring the team accordingly.

The international expansion focus is Southeast Asia and the US, with Hayes explicitly setting aside connectivity-constrained markets for now. The internal definition of success is tipping individual countries into Threads becoming the default app for public conversation, market by market, rather than chasing a global headline number.