Industry sources told Digiday that the company recently told ad executives it expects to be able to buy ads on X’s rival text-based platform as early as the second half of this year.
right Meta’s latest advertising real estate, just over a year after Threads launched. However, details about how these ads will be integrated are still unclear. Meta’s discussions have largely focused on rollout schedules, rather than detailed advertising plans, according to four advertising executives interviewed by Digiday.
One advertising executive, who agreed to speak candidly to Digiday on condition of anonymity, said a beta test of the ad option is likely soon. Neither they nor Mehta could share details about the exact timing.
“Threads currently has no advertising or monetization features because our priority is building consumer value above all else,” a Meta spokesperson told Digiday. “At this point, we encourage companies to experiment with threads as part of their natural social strategy, where it makes sense.”
still, U.S. advertising executives are trying to figure out how these ads work.
Colleen Fielder, group vice president of social and partner marketing solutions at Basis Technologies, announced the extension of Partnership Ads (currently available on Instagram and Facebook), which allows brands to advertise with creators, brands, and other businesses. said her team heard. into the thread.
“I heard that Meta plans to build partnership advertising capabilities on top of Threads. [Meta] There was no determination as to when that would be available,” Fielder said.
Obviously, the chatter about advertising on the thread is still in its early stages.
Still, it’s safe to assume that these new ads for Threads will also appear on Meta’s ad platform Advantage+. After all, it includes all publishing opportunities across both Facebook and Instagram (think image, video, carousel, and collection formats across placement locations like in-feed, search, Stories, and Reels). As such, Threads ads may appear as a new placement option in addition to your current offering.
“I think Meta will prioritize infeed placement first.” [on Threads]and then focus on ads within the trending and topic sections,” Fielder said, adding that the format will likely start with text and images.
John Molina, vice president of Social US at Brainlabs, agreed with Fielder, but added that Instagram could also feature a carousel of trending threads. It’s similar to how the photo-sharing app has been showing users a carousel of recommended threads since last August to further increase awareness. Go to Meta’s latest apps.
If the ad rollout to Threads goes as planned, Meta is confident of achieving its ambitious goal of bringing 1 billion regular users to the app. This is a milestone previously set as a prerequisite for advertising implementation.
As it stands, the platform is still quite far from that number.
When Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg provided an update on monthly user numbers during an earnings call in February, he reported a figure of 130 million. To reach the goal of 1 billion users in a short period of time, Threads will need to expand 8 times faster than the previous month’s growth.
Timing is also especially important when introducing advertising to your platform. Starting too early could frustrate and alienate many current users who enjoy an ad-free space (think BeReal). If you release too late, your platform risks not having enough recurring revenue to keep the lights on, let alone add features to keep users coming back. For example, the latter is exactly what audio-based app Clubhouse has fallen victim to.
Nevertheless, in order to reach this milestone, it was important to have a clear audience before introducing advertising.
That’s because in order to achieve more revenue, Meta needed to find a way to increase the amount of ad impressions and expand the surface area (in this case, the latter is threads).
This move also aligns with the accelerated schedule Threads has been on since its inception. Remember, Meta launched the app much earlier than originally planned to take advantage of his one of Elon Musk’s many antics on X (formerly Twitter) that kept users away from the platform. Released.
