What's next for Threads

Connor Hayes wants Meta's X rival to be "the place on the internet to talk about what's going on in the world." Also: Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour this week on ACCESS.

Threads boss Connor Hayes.

By all measures, Meta’s Threads app had a very good year. The app was Apple’s second-most-downloaded iOS app of the year, trailing only ChatGPT. Threads now has 400 million monthly and 150 million daily active users.

That growth is still coming mainly from Meta’s other platforms. “We do a lot of work in Instagram and Facebook to show off what’s going on in Threads,” Connor Hayes, the head of Threads, told me this week. The playbook: surface personalized Threads content in your Instagram and Facebook feeds, get you to download the app, then wean you off needing those nudges to check it consistently. The goal is to “get people off of being dependent on those promotions and wake up in the morning and just want to open the app,” Hayes explained.

Hayes, who helped launch Threads initially and was named its head in September, has been focused on clarifying the platform’s identity. In our conversation, he said the goal for Threads is to be “the place on the internet to talk about what’s going on in the world.” Practically, that means going vertical by vertical — sports, entertainment, news — and tipping both creators and consumers toward using the app more.

When it comes to competitors, Hayes is focused on more than just X.