Some advertisers see Threads, launched by Meta Platforms in defiance of Twitter, as less controversial and more predictable than Elon Musk's Twitter, while analysts say the new platform could eventually attract marketing budgets.
Threads, launched on July 5, has become the fastest growing social media platform with 100 million users joined, in what appears to be the first serious threat to the micro-blogging app Twitter.
Musk said Twitter would change its branding and logo to the letter "X".
Research firm Sensor Tower reported that Threads saw a drop in downloads and interactions in the week following the hype surrounding its release. The platform does not currently allow serving ads on it.
But analysts expect campaigns to spend heavily on advertising, provided users continue to use the platform.
And if the platform succeeds in retaining users, it can achieve $ 5 billion in annual revenue from ads, which is equivalent to what Twitter won in 2021.
Once ads are available on Threads, brands will "without question" redirect their advertising spending budget away from Twitter, said Matt Yanovsky, co-founder of Moment Lab, an advertising agency that specializes in branding.
Andrew LaFonde, vice president of an advertising agency that worked with Nike, said some advertisers had already turned away from Twitter due to concerns about the rhetoric and sudden changes in the platform's policies since Musk bought the company last year.
Twitter did not respond to an emailed request for comment. It has said before that it does not promote content that could violate its policy, and that 99.99% of impressions on tweets or views are for "good" content.
And Twitter acknowledged a decrease in ad sales, as Musk reported last week that it had decreased by 50%, although it was not clear what time frame he was referring to.
And Threads still has a long way to go before it can catch on like Twitter. Twitter has nearly 240 million daily active users who can benefit from them financially until July last year, according to the company's latest official announcement.
Mark Zuckerberg, head of Meta-platforms, said the company would consider monetizing Threads once it had a clear vision of reaching one billion users.
Zuckerberg said on his account on Threads last week that 10 million users visit the platform daily, and the team will focus until the end of the year on "improving the basics and retaining (users)".
Threads does not support direct messaging, hashtags, or keywords, which limits advertisers' tendency to use it as a platform to follow up on real-time events, as users usually do on Twitter.