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

Speaker 1: It does have a Bond villain aura.

Speaker 2: Threads

Speaker 1: from here. Imagine posting threads. You know what? Every time Connor Hayes comes on the show, he's like, you guys don't post on threads. I posted twice about this interview. So Connor Hayes, get in here and tell us what's new with threads.

Speaker 10: What's up?

Speaker 1: What's up? Good to see you again.

Speaker 10: I'm doing great, man. Yeah. I do I appreciated the post today, John.

Speaker 1: I love it. I love it. We have been getting better. We've been posting a lot more on threads. We're having fun. And also, the the this is the weird thing is that, like, I think, and you'll tell me, but I think what's driving thread success and the growth is the differentiation. Like, I go there for car community. I go there for all sorts of different sub communities around TV shows and different things that aren't real it's not work for me when I'm there. When I'm on Yeah. X or YouTube or even Instagram now, my Instagram, my personal Instagram is just my personal brand, my work product, but threads has it's more fractured, but in a good way, if that makes sense. But you tell me, what's what's driving all the growth?

Speaker 2: First of all, can we just can we just hit the gong or I was billion.

Speaker 10: That was a big swing too.

Speaker 2: That was a big swing.

Speaker 1: It's a warm up swing. Big swing. Coming later in the show.

Speaker 10: Don't show it. So we announced 500,000,000 Huge. Monthlies today.

Speaker 1: Huge.

Speaker 10: Mean, the bit the John, I'll get to your to your question in a second, but the the other thing which I know we've talked in the past when I was on the show about growth coming from promoting the app in Facebook and Instagram. Yeah. You know, another thing that we were sharing today is the proportion of people that are coming to threads not from those promotions has been going up quite a bit in the last year, and that's been a big focus for us. And we're doing it while deepening engagement. So we're up like a 130% year over year on time spent in Japan, 80% year over year in Korea. Part of the playbook that we've been running is to pick these verticals and communities kind of one at a time Yeah. And just blitz them from a go to market perspective and a product perspective altogether. I'm sorry if you guys get background noise. I'm literally like at a team

Speaker 1: I love

Speaker 10: party for this right now.

Speaker 2: Huge. Amazing.

Speaker 1: So we got, you know,

Speaker 10: the entire threads team surrounding me while I'm talking.

Speaker 1: Non family of apps referral traffic, is that links being shared on the open web? Is that screenshots? Is that referral like invite your friend or share a link in a DM?

Speaker 10: Yeah. Often, actually, the initial new user install comes from those. And then what we try to do is get people to come back to the app without a promotion the second time or third time, etcetera.

Speaker 1: Got it.

Speaker 10: So that's been the thing that we we've been most successful at. And And that's just through like making the content better, getting you better connections in the app, launching messaging which sends you notifications when you get DMs, and just having good content based notifications too.

Speaker 2: Yep. Yeah. Every I've I've I've transitioned from someone maybe a year ago that would click over to threads when there was like was almost getting click baited by by something just like a a lurker because there's like Yeah.

Speaker 1: Good Oh, he's in the lurker category.

Speaker 2: I'm in the lurker category.

Speaker 10: Transition from a lurker

Speaker 2: to every every every reply guy starts as a lurker. Yeah. I have to build up I have to build up the the confidence to to move into that. But Yeah. No. It's been it's it's seriously impressive and and yeah. The car the car stuff is what I've been following most closely.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that's so cool

Speaker 10: to hear. We've been doing a bunch with the f one too. I don't know if you guys are f one fans, but Yeah. We have this new feature called live chat. So we're trying to do like One of the things people love about Threads is they call it the Quiet app. Like you're in a world right now where you every single app you go to is like a sound on video feed.

Speaker 1: Yep.

Speaker 10: You go to Threads, you can just like quietly scroll, read things that are going on. One of the things that we're trying to do is make Threads the live second screen that is still quiet while you're watching something on TV. Yeah. So we had a, like, a q and a with Lewis Hamilton and Ferrari last week. There's, like, him and a bunch of fans in a chat that thousands of people can follow along with, react to the messages, asking questions. We've done this for NBA finals. So, yeah, it's it's we're we're just trying to be the best platform for public conversation and that just means we have to lean into these live events.

Speaker 2: Yeah. So it's you're basically taking like what's great about the chat on let's say like a Twitch livestream.

Speaker 1: Mhmm.

Speaker 2: Right? It's like this real time flow of information and ideas, but then making that, like disconnecting it effectively from the programming.

Speaker 10: Yep. Tie it to a live event and put like authoritative voices in charge of it. We were talking, John, I think a little while ago about how well we've done with reality TV. Yeah. I don't know if you guys are into the summerhouse lore, but that kind of like lives on threads

Speaker 2: right Mike Solana?

Speaker 1: I saw yeah. I saw Mike Solana on threads discussing some reality TV show. Maybe it was the the the traders or the is that the one where they play like Mafia? Yeah. There's a couple of these. And it's just so interesting when you bump into someone who you know in a different context, and they're on threads, and they're just, like like, they're sort of, like, wearing a different it's a more casual outfit, basically. And, like, the the the posture can be very political on other apps or very defensive or very aggressive, or maybe they're a particular influencer, and they're always, you know, this just killed this on LinkedIn, but then they come over to threads and they're just sort of just being a normal person in some ways, if that makes sense.

Speaker 10: It worked. I mean, it's it's I think a lot of it is just those people wanna wear that hat sometimes. Yeah. When you were talking about it, it was like your stuff too. Yeah. There's something very like human about building an app that's for conversation and leaning into that. And I think in a world where like increasingly so conversation is just very hard to have or the person isn't human Mhmm. You know, we're trying to make that the case on Thread. So that's fine.

Speaker 1: What what is the KPI culture like? Like because you're the Quiet app now. It's working. It seems great. But like it feels like there's gonna be a moment where it's like, okay. Well, let's a b test vertical endless scrolling video and it's gonna outperform and you're gonna be like, yeah. We're no longer the client app. We're actually just like the second Instagram and like and it just maths out. But like, it feels like that's not the mission. That's not the goal. But like, how how do how will this actually play out?

Speaker 10: I mean, I think that's that's the difference between metrics and goals. Okay. Like, it's the you know, the goal is for us to be the best app for public conversation. Yeah. I know that I could I could tomorrow pump time spent on threads by putting more video on the feed. Sure. But that wouldn't make us the best app for public conversation. So we try to find metrics that give us as best the possible proxy for that goal. Yeah. And a lot of times actually it is like how much is their back and forth reply happening on a top level post.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 10: You know, in terms of growth, the the the main KPI that the team works on is what we call threads driven now. It's like people that are coming back not because they saw a promotion. Sure. So my, you know, my job is to, like, set those goals, give them the best incentives possible, then but just know that the metrics are gonna be imperfect. And sometimes I need to, like, come in and, you know, make a strategic decision to do something that might be against the metric, like, your point with vertical video. We're not gonna do we're not gonna do a vertical video tab in threads. Like, that's not part of the plan.

Speaker 1: It's gonna be a horizontal video. You will turn your phone to see and it will be the entire Lord of Rings extended edition. We're getting ten hours. It's gonna be Yeah.

Speaker 10: Nineteen ninety six NBA finals game four front to back.

Speaker 1: We will

Speaker 2: How how how do you think about building your own kind of culture within Meta? Like, is that is that a thing? Is that something that's encouraged? Or is it or or is it like, you know, all big, you know, one big team? Or are there do you guys like do you guys have like a nickname for for people working on threads? Like They're

Speaker 1: not metamase, they're threaders.

Speaker 10: Threads. Okay.

Speaker 2: Threads.

Speaker 10: We we have a very unique culture. I mean, I I think like all good cultures, it kind of like happened on its own based on the people that were excited to work on the app. Because I think if you're coming to work on threads, you want to be on a smaller scrappier team. You probably care a lot about culture and, you know, pop culture and the types of things that we spend our time on. We just had, you know, actually, a team of people in here talking about, like, how we do that. So I would say it's encouraged in as much as you're, like, building value around the culture, but, like, it's really important for us to not build the culture around the idea that we're different and special because we get so much value from being at Instagram and Meta. Like Yeah. All of the infrastructure that we use, all of the integrity teams that we leverage, the monetization that we do comes from an ad seamless inside Instagram. And so it's like you're trying to strike this balance between making sure people feel like they identify with the app and the stuff that we're doing, but appreciate, you know, being inside the bigger company where we just get so much value.

Speaker 1: Instagram Pro recently want launched $3.99 a month, I believe, for some pro premium features. I upgraded in instantly. Some fun details I haven't

Speaker 10: even dug into. He's viewing your story twice.

Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. That's one of the features that they show. I like the fact I don't post on my story that often. I like the fact that I can extend it to forty eight hours because I'm not a daily story person. I'm only sharing, like, news about the show on there when someone else tags me. And so just extending it a little longer, that felt like a valuable feature. But are you looking to that for premium subscriptions there? Are you more focused on the ad product on on the monetization side? Like, because it's a new surface area. It's sort of unexplored. Where do you want all that to go?

Speaker 10: More focused on ads. Like, we're we're not currently working on

Speaker 1: Thank you.

Speaker 10: Threads as a part of the meta subscription. We love that. That's a really good high margin business.

Speaker 1: I I completely agree. No. I I I like the subscription too, but I see it as a yes and for sure. Yeah. Because the ad business should be so good.

Speaker 10: I think if threads gets big enough and and we have good offerings to people for something like a subscription, why not? But Yeah. It's not something we're working on right now.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 10: We did we launched ads globally four months ago and have just been like slowly scaling it in line with the engagement going up, you know, just trying to be careful about it.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. What what is different about a conversational or kind of a news driven platform like threads Yeah. Like acts versus like a more passive product like, you know

Speaker 1: People say lean forward

Speaker 2: versus lean back. Question is like the like the question that people have always had with Twitter and X is like, why wasn't the ad product like amazing for Yeah. Advertisers? Why did it never really maybe scale to

Speaker 1: Like was it an ad matching problem or was it a behavioral problem?

Speaker 2: There's been this like, you know, the audience on Twitter historically was like so valuable. Yeah. The user base was always smaller but, know, some of the most important people in the world are on there as like their primary

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 2: You know, application. And so the big question was, like, why was it never a great ads business? Do you have any theories? Like, you know, one, you could Mhmm. Say it was execution

Speaker 1: I get

Speaker 2: or I could say that.

Speaker 1: I won't You could you could not Connor

Speaker 2: Hayes says

Speaker 1: Connor Hayes doesn't disagree with Journey.

Speaker 10: He sat silently. Yeah. I don't think it's the format because, you know, we know from years and years of experience. I mean, think about Facebook ads before the app was so video centric. That feed format is kinda similar to what you have in like a Threads or an X today. Yeah. And that was one of the most efficiently monetized surfaces ever in the history of technology. So I'm pretty confident that we'll be able to get the ads. I'm pretty confident that we'll be able to to get Threads ads into a a really good place there. The other thing that matters is, you know, you obviously, it's like how much attention are people paying to the content that they see in a feed, but also how much content do they view. Like, the more shots you have to show them something relevant, the better you're gonna do. So you're gonna monetize more effectively if people are viewing a 100 things a day versus 50 things a day. Mhmm. So, you know, to your point on KPIs, John, like, one of the big ones that our team has is just like, how many impressions of content do people have in the app? Yeah. And then we try to make that as deep as possible by giving them more relevant stuff. And eventually, some percentage of those will just be ads that hopefully are really good as they come from the Instagram and Facebook ad in. Like, advertisers can just opt in to their demand going to our surface. It's a checkbox in the flow where they create all the IG and Facebook stuff. So I don't know. I think we're set up for that to do pretty well, but we're just, again, trying to be careful and not scale it too quickly while we're still making the products great. It's been under three years at this point. So I think sometimes people lose sight of the fact that we're still a bit of a young app in the in the ecosystem.

Speaker 2: Totally.

Speaker 1: Will AI generated ads be more difficult to crack on threads? I'm thinking that if I'm on Instagram and I have, you know, maybe it's Manus or some MSI or MSL like agent that can go take screenshots from my website, reinstantiate them, and put that in an Instagram flow. Like, you're showing me the product. Job maybe finished might convert well. But if I'm advertising advertising on on threads threads and I need a really punchy hook and I actually need to think about like a 140, 280 characters that are really, really high skill ceiling type writing, that historically has been hard and that's why like brands come off as, like, cringey often on these short text based mediums. And I'm wondering, even though we have all this crazy acceleration in AI, I haven't followed an account where I'm like, oh, yeah. Like, this model is really good at writing tweets or posts that are a 180 characters. They're honestly better

Speaker 10: than deep research. Keeps us Yeah. That's part of what keeps us us popular, I think. Yeah. You know? Like, if there's especially when you're optimizing for conversation, it's at least right now, humans are pretty good at telling when they're conversing with another human. And also there's a lot of metadata. Right? They have a profile. They have a username. They might be verified. I think for ad creative, you know, on on the organic side, posts with photos in them do really well on threads. It's a pretty high percentage of the our top performing content. I think it's probably similar on x. And so my sense is that as AI generated ads get more prevalent, it'll probably be through the image pass more than the the text path.

Speaker 1: Sure.

Speaker 10: And I don't know. I I'm not pulling off of any data besides personal experience on this, but, you know, usually for me, the image is the hook when I'm thinking about buying something or getting, you know, more fond of a brand. Obviously, the content matters at some point, but I think the image is gonna be what pull people in.

Speaker 2: Jordy? How how much do you think about what Starlink will do to global connectivity? There's a bunch of people that don't have Internet today that are gonna have, like, reliable, fast Internet over the next ten years, people coming onto the Internet for the first time. Is that something that you're thinking about, or is there just enough people that haven't tried the app yet that that are that are obviously taking more of the focus?

Speaker 10: I think probably more of the latter. Like, we're we're not at the point with growing threads where we're worried about, you know, lacking more opportunity at the top of the funnel for people that are already online or maybe even already online and using similar services. The other thing is we tend to be pretty market focused. Like, we like I was mentioning before, have been really focused on Southeast Asia. Japan, Korea are two of the biggest ad markets in the world. We are very US focused. And so in these early stages, I think it's actually really easy, especially if you track a top line global number, to see that go up, but not actually build an app that's, like, meaningful and makes sense as a big part of people's lives every day in a country. So I look at success more as, like, tipping individual countries into threads being the app of record for public public conversation. Right now, that's starting to happen in Southeast Asia, and then The US is our our biggest focus outside of that. So from that lens, I I think in those countries, the connectivity is quite high at this point, so we we worry less about that opportunity.

Speaker 1: What's the plan to get at Connor on threads? You got an underscore sitting there. How did you get sniped? You're the head of threads.

Speaker 10: Craziest part about this is the, the Connor is an Instagram employee, I think, where he was at some point. Yeah.

Speaker 1: So he's locked down. Wow. Johnny come late late on our platform. Yeah. That's hilarious.

Speaker 2: It's over. It's over. You're never getting it.

Speaker 1: Walk me through walk me through the process of spinning out spinning up a little like I don't know if you call them like micro features or something. Like the a year ago, you launched sort of like disappearing ink text, sort of glows Oh, spoilers. Yeah. Spoilers. And these little features are they seem so simple. They're probably getting easier to build because of AI tooling. But at the same time, like, your code base can be kind of a mess. 25 people wanna do different things with text at the same time. Like, how do you think about those? What's the importance of that in terms of the growth?

Speaker 10: So we we have actually, like, done a bunch of work to get the process on this right. Mhmm. I think, like, social products often you know, there's so much work that is just, like, getting the details right, executing well. But there's a bunch of work that's just like a hits business. Like Yeah. You know, look at Instagram, getting Instants to work. It's just you gotta take a bunch of shots on goal with small creative teams. So a lot of the stuff that you see in the app that feels like a little bit more fun, the music attachment feature we did, animated stickers

Speaker 1: Mhmm.

Speaker 10: These are like pods of three or four, you know, technical but creative people that we just give a bunch of space to. We talk to them, like, once a week or once every two weeks about the ideas they have, give a bit of feedback, and then they've just been coming up with hits. So the way that and and your point about AI making that easier is true. I mean, they the I think one of the fun things that we've seen is that design talent has been getting more technical Sure. Which has made these things easier to build. Yeah. So whereas in the past, you would have two people sparring over how to build a feature, now the really creative designer with great taste can actually develop the thing on their own.

Speaker 1: That makes a ton of sense. Well, congratulations on hitting 500,000,000 monthly active users.

Speaker 2: Fantastic. 500,000,000,000 soon. 500,000,000,000 soon.

Speaker 10: Hey. With Starlink, you never know.

Speaker 1: Economic imperative. Solve the fertility crisis because we need more users, and that's the fastest way to get more. Everyone should be having 10 the 10 child policy rolled out globally. Yeah. For Threads.

Speaker 2: Great to see you, Connor. Congrats to the whole team.

Speaker 6: Thank you.

Speaker 1: We'll talk to soon. See you

Speaker 8: the update.

Speaker 2: Great work.

Speaker 1: Have a good one. Incredible. AI futures does it again. This is a post from Bronson Shalin. It says mid twenty twenty six, France wakes up. Europe's leading lab releases, their latest open source frontier model. It's state of the art. The US and China scramble wildly to catch up. The mainstream narrative around AI has changed from maybe the hypo blow over to a guess this is the next big thing. The US enters talks with France to hopefully gain access but without much success. I like a little twist on the China wakes up from AI twenty twenty seven. A funny copy pasta at this point, but still, again, congrats to Mistral on launching Le Chateau Fat.

Speaker 2: This is important before we're joined by author

Speaker 1: What's this?

Speaker 2: Luke Burgis. We have a safety alert Okay. From the US embassy in the South. Mhmm. Ambassador Herschel Walker has an important message for American visiting The Bahamas. Ski jet ski rentals pose a serious risk of injury death and death. US government employees are banned from renting them. That's how serious they are.

Speaker 1: Wow.

Speaker 2: And you should avoid them too. Really taking shots at the jet jet ski industrial

Speaker 1: A lot of people were surprised to see Herschel Walker. He's a famous football running back. This is how they found out that he is in fact the ambassador.

Speaker 2: But fun story. I is the risk worth it?

Speaker 1: Jet ski? I don't know.

Speaker 2: Are you a big jet ski guy?

Speaker 1: No. Not really. I'm fine. I prefer scuba if I'm on the water.

Speaker 2: Every every time every time I'm on a jet ski, euphoria.

Speaker 1: Good.

Speaker 2: You like it? It's yeah. It's it's incredible.

Speaker 1: They're fun.

Speaker 2: Under I think there's I think they're underrated.

Speaker 1: For them.

Speaker 2: I think they're underrated.

Speaker 1: They feel like very highly rated.

Speaker 2: No. I mean, highly rated but but are people organizing their life around jet skiing at scale?

Speaker 1: It is nice that it's sort of the experience of a motorcycle with a lot lower stakes. Right?

Speaker 2: Gold Rock says jet skis and vibe coating are a golden combo.