Instagram to Launch ‘Threads’ to Compete With Twitter

So

threads

. It

launch

es this Thursday. How much can you profit from some of the recent turmoil on Twitter? Jake, it took Twitter 16 or 17 years to get to the scale it has today, which is, you know, on the order of 250, I think millions of active user

threads

are not going to achieve that in a compressed time. frame. However, Facebook has a much better-oiled advertising machine than Twitter. So if they do it right, there is potential for a lot of benefits. What an interesting thing to see, though, if you think about the closest rival to Twitter, it's probably LinkedIn, you know, kind of a professional audience.

Oftentimes, you know, there are a lot of media outlets and journalists and politicians on Twitter, but in some ways adjacent on LinkedIn, they haven't really benefited hugely yet, at least from all the problems on Twitter. Its revenue increased by 200 million year over year in the most recent quarter. Maybe there's a bit of a lag as some of the advertisers shift gears and look their way, but maybe it's a pretty good metric for the kind of space Twitter is vacating. And, at least, the period necessary to cover it. I mean, the

launch

of another social media platform on the back of the launch of many others seems a little daunting for advertisers to try to understand where they should be, where they should be more, where they should be less.

I know we don't know the pitch to advertisers, but what do you think it would be in the threads, in the meta to say, okay, we know we're new, but come advertise with us? Well, it's much easier for them than for, say, the blue sky. Good? It's like the rival is being manipulated by, you know, former Twitter executives because the stuff has existing relationships with advertisers, so they can accept and say, well, look, if you want to have the cool, hip young people, we I have Instagram. If you want to get a different demographic that I won't identify, you can use Facebook.

And if you want to get an audience that sets the agenda for more mainstream trending news, then we hope to have threads. It's easier for them to develop that. And you can also send the same ads through these different channels. If you sell based on the people you reach rather than the platform you use, then you know, there's nothing, there may be nothing stopping them from moving forward. So that's clearly an opportunity for them. They have much better advertising. You talk a lot about probabilistic and deterministic advertising, so we think probabilistic loosely fits this demographic determinism: we know exactly who is at the end of this device and is viewing this content.

Deterministic is what people want because then they can target ads much more precisely, even with some of the anonymity settings that are now in play due to things like GDPR. Facebook and Instagram have very good deterministic data, and that's something they generally don't have. One of the reasons Twitter really was the introduction of blue verification ticks. Sure, it's partly a question of revenue, but it's also about knowing exactly who is on the bottom of a given account, which actually helps them target better ads.