Following several months of trials in limited markets including the United States and Japan, Meta announced today the global expansion of advertising opportunities on its Instagram Threads app. Advertisers worldwide will now be able to target Threads’ monthly user base, which currently stands at over 320 million active individuals.
Meta confirmed that the new ad placements will be automatically enabled by default for any new advertising campaigns utilizing either the company’s Advantage+ or Manual Placement methods. Advertisers selecting the Manual Placement option, however, retain the flexibility to opt out from placing ads in Threads feeds. Additionally, Meta will launch an “inventory filter” tool, giving advertisers control over the sensitivity of the content appearing adjacent to their ads.
At present, while ad placements are available to advertisers globally, actual ad delivery will initially be limited to selected regions before steadily rolling out to additional markets. Meta’s move to fully launch Threads ads signals the company’s confidence that the platform has reached a level of maturity robust enough to compete directly with social media rivals such as Elon Musk’s X platform. Meta is notably positioning Threads as especially attractive for businesses, emphasizing that roughly 75% of Threads users already follow one or more commercial accounts.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, speaking in the latest earnings call in January, expressed optimism for the long-term growth potential of Threads. Zuckerberg projected that Threads could attract over a billion users within coming years and reported that the app continues to grow rapidly, adding more than one million sign-ups per day.
Notably, Threads’ early growth and adoption have relied significantly upon its close integration with Instagram. Leveraging the existing social connections and follower networks from Instagram has positioned the Threads app as a natural extension for users to interact with familiar friends, brands, and content creators almost immediately upon signing up.
This built-in advantage has not been without controversy, bolstering arguments made by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in an ongoing antitrust trial against Meta. If successful, the government’s lawsuit could potentially force the divestiture of Meta’s flagship platforms Instagram and WhatsApp.
In parallel, Meta continues to introduce various popular features from emerging competitors into Threads. In particular, Meta has adopted the ActivityPub protocol, used by decentralized networks such as Mastodon, with future integration planned to allow Threads to connect to the broader open social ecosystem known as the ‘fediverse.’ If completed, Threads would likely surpass Mastodon—whose user base currently numbers just over 8 million registered accounts with fewer than one million active monthly users—to become the largest federated social app.
Further, Threads has incorporated features popularized by the competing platform Bluesky, such as custom user-generated feeds beyond the primary algorithmic recommendation system, and curated starter packs that simplify the discovery of interesting accounts for new users. Unlike Bluesky, now counting more than 35 million users, Threads still lacks user-specific moderation controls and defaults to algorithmically driven content recommendations with no option for users to change their moderation settings.
Overall, Meta’s global rollout of advertising within Threads clearly marks the platform as ready for monetization and increased competition in the social media market.
