Remember Threads? Meta’s overly ambitious retort to Twitter X? No? Well, it won’t be picking up many more users once it eventually weaves ads into the mix – set to debut in early 2025 according to a report from The Information (via The Verge).
Losing the thread
What was once one of the very few redeeming qualities of the platform is going away soon. We’ve known this much for months since Instagram head, Adam Mosseri confirmed in a Thread that “We definitely plan to bring ads to Threads,” in April. It was more a question of when our (the royal ‘our’) eyeballs would be subjected to the plague that is advertising.
“I get why people have concerns, but at the end of the day we’re a business and Threads needs to make enough money to pay for the people and servers that it takes to run the service and provide it to people for free,” Mosseri continued.
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As for how ads will appear in your feed, your guess is as good as ours – but nowhere near as good as Alessandro Paluzzi’s, a developer who managed to spot a “Sponsored” tag within the app, which appears next to the poster’s username, as seen here. It’s not quite as egregious as X, and we’re grateful. Again, we’re speaking for users.
Another plus (we’re looking for any crumb) is that the pool of advertisers allowed to make and publish ads will reportedly be a small one, at least while Meta gets everything in order during the early stages of the rollout. That should mean few to none of those unbearable mobile game ads. You know the ones we’re talking about.
