Instagram flooded Threads with celebrities and brands at launch - 2 minutes read




If you created an account when Instagram’s Threads app launched last night, one of the first things you might’ve noticed was the sheer number of celebrities, brands, and influencers populating your feed. From Gordon Ramsay to Michael Strahan and Jennifer Lopez, Meta pre-filled its new Twitter competitor with a boatload of well-known users to make the app feel less empty at launch.

While Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Instagram head Adam Mosseri got spots on the app ahead of time, so did big names such as Mark Cuban, Shakira, and Seth Curry. Meta also got influencers like MKBHD, Lauren Godwin, Alan Chikin Chow, and Michael Le on board early, along with brands like Netflix, as well as Warner Bros. Discovery’s Shark Week, Animal Planet, and HGTV.

Oddly, some of Instagram’s biggest influencers were still missing on Threads as of Thursday morning. As pointed out by Insider, only a small fraction of the top 20 most-followed accounts on Instagram have made it to Threads so far, including Instagram itself, Kim Kardashian, Khloé Kardashian, J.Lo, and National Geographic. Soccer superstars Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi still aren’t on the app, nor are Selena Gomez, Taylor Swift, and Instagram critic Kylie Jenner.

Still, the number of big names on the app isn’t appealing to everyone. Some people are only looking for a way to connect with the people they know on the app, and Meta is clouding that experience with a feed that surfaces posts from both the accounts you follow and suggested content. Mosseri says a following-only feed is on the list of potential features, however.

At this time of writing, Threads has grown to 30 million registered users. I’m sure part of the growth is related to how easy it is to connect your Instagram account to the platform, but it also seems like all the celebrities and brands on the platform played a role, too. My colleague David Pierce recently wrote that he misses the places on the web that “felt like everyone was there.” It seems like Meta is trying to capture this same feeling by building up a solid foundation of early users, but we’ll soon find out if that’s enough to hold the platform up.



Source: The Verge

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