Meta’s Threads to show ads for first time in US, Japan

Meta Platforms Inc. will show advertising on social network Threads for the first time, opening up a new revenue stream for the company and increasing competition for Elon Musk’s X, reports Bloomberg.

The ads will come from a “handful of brands” and appear only in the US and Japan to start, according to a post Friday from Instagram boss Adam Mosseri, who called the move a “test.”

Meta will be “closely monitoring this test before scaling it more broadly, with the goal of getting ads on Threads to a place where they are as interesting as organic content,” he wrote.

Meta launched Threads, a clone of Musk’s X, in mid-2023 after Musk bought the social network formerly known as Twitter in October 2022 and struggled to maintain its advertisers. Meta has teased the idea of bringing ads to Threads for months, but held off to focus on expanding the network’s user base. Threads had 300 million monthly users, and more than 100 million daily users as of December, Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg announced then.