Meta’s Threads vs. Twitter: What the Copycat Means for Elon Musk’s App | WSJ Tech News Briefing

[Music]foreignwelcome to Tech news briefing it'sThursday July 6th I'm Zoe Thomas for TheWall Street Journal Elon Musk andTwitter are facing a lot of challengesthis week a new competitor emergedthreadsits release comes just days afterTwitter announced it would limit howmany posts users could see in a day andit's not the first time meta has copiedan app or feature from a social mediacompetitor so what does this mean forTwitter for meta and for users wsjreporter Salvador Rodriguez is here withthose answers to start off you know whyis meta launching threads meta islaunching threads because it's a goodopportunity to release a product likethis Twitter has had a number of issuessince Elon Musk took ownership of thatsocial network in October and for metait's a way to give users more stuff todo it's a way to keep them around longerin the meta social media Empire andeventually it would be one more way forthem to show advertisements to people Iwant to talk a little bit more about theimpact that this will have on Twitterbut just to stick with threads for asecond I mean meta is launching thisthrough Instagram can you tell us alittle bit more about why it's chosen todo it that way instead of having astandalone app yeah a lot of thesecompanies make it look easy but reallywhen it comes to getting people todownload and sign up for a new app it'sa lot of work and by springboardingthreads off of Instagram meta isreducing the amount of friction that ittakes for someone to sign up and get inthere and quickly just start using theapp Instagram users will be able toquickly log into threads using theirInstagram accounts and once they do thatit'll also be really easy for them tofollow the same people that they alreadyfollow on Instagram so this isn't forthe first time we've seen meta copy whata social media competitor is doing is ityeah meta has a long and uh quiteelaborate history of copying competitorsin several occasions to much successthey did this in 2016 when Instagramlaunched stories which was a copy ofstories by Snapchat and they did itagain in 2020 when Instagram launchedreels which was their version of shortform video AKA Tick Tock and you caneven go further back than that about adecade ago when they launched messengerYou could argue that that was a copy ofWhatsApp for just in case if they hadn'tbeen able to secure WhatsApp in anacquisition so this is something thatthey do and they do well and it's workedfor them in the past so what does thismean for Twitter what are the potentialbig impacts of having a player like metaenter this space for Twitter this is theSharks circling I spoke with a bunch ofsocial media experts including somefolks who had previously worked at bothTwitter and meta I also spoke with somesocial media analysts and none of themthink that this means Twitter will dieovernight like we're not gonna seeeverybody leave this bar to go to theother bar that's not going to happen butwhat is going to happen is that overtime any time an issue comes up oranytime Elon says something that offendsa subset of people every Twitter userwill now have a real alternative thatthey can go to instead what do you meanby real alternative because there havebeen other competitors you know Blue Skyspill these other apps that have comeout and tried to compete with Twitteralready yeah there certainly have beenothers uh Mastodon Blue Sky truth socialeven though they exist the problem thatthey have is this they don't have massadoption they haven't seen a networkeffect right from the estimates thatI've seen the three apps that Imentioned are all less than one millionactive users Twitter is at about 350million monthly active users based onestimates that we've seen we know thatInstagram has more than 2 billionmonthly active users now I don't knowhow broadly threads is being released Idon't know if it's going to be availablefor every single Instagram user in everyMarket where Instagram is available butif you get just a quarter of Instagramusers to sign up for this thing it'salready larger than Twitter and at theend of the day an app like this it'sabout broadcasting whatever you have tosay to as many people as possible rightit's a one-to-many broadcast channel andif the main point of you using this isto be as loud as you can be you're gonnago to whichever of these apps has themost users I think that will ultimatelybe the deciding factor what does thatmean for advertisers who also want thebiggest audience possible foradvertisers it remains to be seen whenit comes to social media obviously theusers come first and then theadvertisers just go to where those usersare I think another strength that metahas is that they have have a really deeproster of advertising clients so whatdoes that mean for Twitter's efforts toretain and to grow its advertisingRevenue the biggest concern would be ifthreads does manage to siphon off a alarge swath of Twitter users they'realready struggling when it comes toadvertising Revenue right they peaked at4.51 billion in advertising Revenue in2021 and according to an estimate byInsider intelligence they're expected togenerate 3 billion in advertisingrevenue for 2023. so they're already ona downward trajectory and so it's it'sjust going to be a much more competitivemarket for Twitter moving forwardall right that's ourreports briefing for more Tech storieshead over to our website wsj.com I'm ZoeThomas for The Wall Street Journalthanks for listening[Music][Music]