Threads just had its biggest month ever

Last month, threads.net racked up 21.7 million hits from US visitors to its website on mobile and desktop, the most that the site has recorded since its high-profile, Instagram-rocket-boosted launch, according to data from Similarweb.com.

After its introduction in July 2023, which saw it catapult itself to 100 million users as it piggybacked off the enormous Instagram audience, the platform went seriously cold. Getting curious users to try it once was easy enough. Getting them to come back a second time was much harder, with constant headlines reporting on the woes of the app that wanted to eat Twitter’s lunch.

But despite how chaotic the actual Threads feed can be, the platform has slowly found its feet. Three months ago it hit 175 million users, and the latest traffic data — which isn’t perfect because it doesn’t account for any in-app usage — suggests that the momentum has continued.

Spinnin’ a good yarn

However, there are still a lot of problems to fix before Threads gets anywhere near unseating Twitter (X) as the biggest text-based social media platform; its 21.7 million US visits in September was just 2% of the 1.02 billion that X managed, per Similarweb. One of the latest is an “engagement bait” issue, as fame-hungry Threads posters deliberately create content designed to incense other users — like this from internet guru Katie Notopoulos, who experimented with “rage bait” content on the site:

That content has become so prevalent that the company is now working to “get it under control,” per Instagram boss Adam Mosseri.

Go Deeper: Threads vs. The World.