Meta’s Threads has spent the past year doing something X’s loudest critics only theorized about: quietly pulling brand advertisers away from Elon Musk’s platform by offering the one thing X currently cannot – a calm, brand-safe environment with an audience already inside the Meta ecosystem.
The Advertiser Exodus From X Is Real, and Threads Is Positioned to Catch It
X has been hemorrhaging brand advertisers since Musk’s acquisition in late 2022, and the departures have not been symbolic. Major consumer brands – from automotive companies to retail giants – reduced or paused spending on X after content moderation policies loosened and brand adjacency risks climbed. The platform’s pitch to advertisers has grown increasingly complicated, requiring brands to weigh reach against reputational exposure every time they sign a media buy.
Threads launched in July 2023 and crossed 100 million sign-ups within its first week, riding Instagram’s existing user base like a highway on-ramp. That early momentum stalled somewhat in the months following launch, as the app lacked key features – no hashtags, no search for trending topics, no desktop web app at launch. But Meta did not abandon it. The company treated Threads as a long build, steadily adding features, integrating it deeper into the Instagram ecosystem, and letting the product mature before aggressively monetizing it.
That patience is now paying dividends. By early 2025, Threads was reporting over 320 million monthly active users, a figure that places it well within serious media planning consideration. More importantly for advertisers, those users skew toward demographics that brands spend heavily to reach – younger consumers, urban professionals, and lifestyle-oriented audiences already conditioned to seeing sponsored content through Instagram. The behavioral familiarity removes friction from the ad experience in ways that newer, standalone platforms simply cannot replicate.
Meta’s advertising infrastructure is the underlying advantage that no competitor can quickly copy. When a brand runs a Threads campaign, it plugs into the same targeting tools, audience segments, measurement dashboards, and creative formats already built for Facebook and Instagram. There is no learning curve, no new vendor relationship to manage, and no separate reporting stack to reconcile. For a media buyer already spending millions across Meta properties, adding Threads inventory is almost administrative.
How Meta Is Quietly Converting X’s Discomfort Into Its Own Revenue
Meta has not mounted a loud campaign against X. There are no comparative ads, no public statements positioning Threads as the antidote to X’s chaos. Instead, the strategy has been structural – remove the friction for brands that want to leave X, and make sure Threads is a credible destination when they do. That restraint is itself strategic. Picking a public fight with Musk would generate noise that could backfire; letting the product speak draws in advertisers without the controversy.
Brand safety is the deciding variable in this shift. Advertising on a text-based social platform means a brand’s logo and message can appear adjacent to almost any kind of content, and the algorithmic unpredictability of feeds makes guarantees impossible. X’s moderation rollbacks created a documented pattern of brand ads appearing alongside content that violated those brands’ own internal standards. Threads, by contrast, has maintained stricter content policies aligned with Instagram’s existing framework – a framework that has been tested, litigated, and refined over a decade of pressure from advertisers.
There is also the matter of verified identity and creator relationships. Meta has been building out Threads’ creator program with the same infrastructure it used to grow Instagram’s influencer economy. Brands that already have established creator partnerships on Instagram can extend those relationships to Threads without renegotiating contracts or developing new formats. A creator who posts sponsored content for a fashion label on Instagram can now carry that relationship into Threads with minimal additional cost to either party, which makes the platform’s ad inventory more attractive than its raw user numbers alone would suggest.
X, meanwhile, has tried to retain advertisers through discounts and direct CEO-level outreach, with Musk personally attempting to reassure some large brands. That approach has had limited success. Several major advertisers returned to X in limited capacities, but full spend restoration has been rare, and the platform’s revenue from advertising remains well below its pre-acquisition peak. The gap between where X was and where it is gives Threads a window that may not stay open indefinitely – if X stabilizes and cleans up its moderation issues, some of that migration could reverse.
For now, though, the timing favors Meta. Threads is maturing as an ad product precisely when advertisers are most motivated to find an alternative. Meta is expected to begin scaling Threads monetization more aggressively through 2025, adding ad formats and introducing the kind of performance-measurement tools that drive direct-response budgets. Once performance advertisers – who care about click-through rates and conversion data more than brand safety – find the numbers work on Threads, the platform’s ad revenue could accelerate faster than its user growth.
What X Still Has That Threads Doesn’t
X retains real advantages that matter to specific advertiser categories. News, sports, politics, and live events still generate conversation on X at a volume and intensity that Threads has not matched. Real-time cultural moments – election nights, championship games, major breaking stories – still pull audiences to X because the platform’s architecture was built around speed and public discourse. Advertisers in those verticals, including television networks, sports betting companies, and political campaigns, still find X’s live-moment density difficult to replicate elsewhere.
Threads has yet to fully crack the real-time conversation dynamic. Its feed algorithm prioritizes engagement over recency, which works well for lifestyle content but flattens the urgency that makes live-event advertising valuable. Meta knows this, and the product team has been experimenting with ways to surface trending topics more prominently – but threading the needle between algorithmic curation and live-moment spontaneity is genuinely hard. Whether Threads can close that gap will determine how much of X’s advertiser base it can permanently absorb, versus how much it captures only as a hedge while brands maintain parallel spending on both platforms.
