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This editorial series examines industry trends across the media, media buying and marketing sectors as 2023 closes and the new year begins. More from the series →
News publishers are cautious to pour more resources into Threads, the nearly six-month old X-competitor from Meta, and don’t have plans to do so in the near future as limited data available to their social and audience development teams makes it difficult to determine whether investing more into the platform is worth it.
That includes three news organizations — including The Boston Globe, CNN and The New York Times — where execs said they were seeing engagement grow on Threads since its launch. All three declined to share data to back that up, citing the difficulty of measuring aggregate data on the platform. But other news publishers like the BBC and the Guardian U.S. have stopped posting from their main accounts on the platform, and are monitoring whether it’s worth investing resources into.
For now, Threads remains a place for experimentation. News orgs are seeing what posts resonate with their audiences — judging by likes, replies and referral traffic, as no other metrics are available to them from Threads — as they look for alternative ways to connect with their audiences on text-based social platforms, especially as referral traffic and engagement on X (formerly Twitter) continues to fall. Meta does distinguish Threads traffic from its other properties, including Facebook and Instagram.
X still gets about 100 times more web traffic than Threads worldwide and has more than 11 times more monthly active users of its mobile apps in the U.S., according to David Carr, senior insights manager at data analytics company Similarweb. Estimated November desktop traffic show X had 5.9 billion visits worldwide, down 13.8% year over year and a decrease of 4% month over month, according to Carr, while Threads had 49.4 million visits was flat month over month. Based on data from Android users, X usage was down 2% from October to November, while Threads was up 12.8%, he said.
“There’s a pull to Threads — it’s a good platform, it’s a good [and] improving product. And there’s an element of being pushed away from X, where there’s only so much time you can spend on it a day now before you just want to pull your hair out,” said Matt Karolian, general manager at Boston.com. “It does feel like a confluence of factors that have really helped it grow.”
Social teams at The Boston Globe and The New York Times that primarily focus on posts for Facebook and X have added managing and programming content on Threads to their daily workflows — but those that oversee those teams are hesitant to put more time and energy into Threads beyond that, and have not assigned dedicated editors to the platform.
“Most things that we rely on to evaluate a platform and if it’s worth investing resources in we don’t know about Threads,” said Jake Grovum,