Instagram Threads won’t have to worry about Twitter’s years of advertising pain

The news: With more than 10 million sign-ups in the first few hours after launching, Meta has proven that there’s significant user interest in its Twitter competitor Threads. Now comes the next challenge: proving to advertisers that it isn’t victim to the same advertising woes that plagued Twitter even years before Elon Musk took over the company.

Repeating the past: Visually, Threads sure looks a lot like Twitter—and just about every other Twitter copycat on the market. Advertisers can’t buy space on the platform just yet, but Meta will have to prove that it can provide a different advertising experience than Twitter.

• It’s worth remembering that Twitter’s ad business was in trouble long before Musk sent it careening back down to its 2019 figures. In 2021, the company owned just 3.9% of total US social media ad spending—just above Pinterest at 3.2%.
• In the time since, it’s gotten worse. Its share shrunk to 3.6% in 2022, 2.5% this year, and will drop to just 1.8% by 2025, according to our forecast. That consistently low share shows that, despite its social and political import, Twitter struggled to break out of a third tier of social platforms when it came to advertising spending.
• Old Twitter aside, it’s simply a rough time for social media ad spending. After nearly two decades of booming growth, spending will reach its slowest pace in more than a decade this year, though Meta’s scale makes it an outlier.