Throughout Meta’s second quarter earnings name with buyers on Wednesday, Zuckerberg was requested a number of occasions about Threads and his expectations for its long-term success. He mentioned it’s a “bizarre anomaly within the tech trade that there hasn’t been an app like this for text-based convos that has reached 1 billion individuals,” echoing earlier feedback he has made each on Threads itself and through a current interview with the podcaster Lex Fridman.

Threads reached 100 million signups quicker than any shopper software program product in historical past, nevertheless it’s nowhere close to reaching the 1-billion-user membership but. Its engagement can be estimated to have slowed considerably since that preliminary rush of signups, although Zuckerberg mentioned final week that “tens of hundreds of thousands” of individuals have been nonetheless utilizing the app each day.

In keeping with Zuckerberg, the primary focus for Threads, past including key lacking options, is enhancing the app’s retention with present customers. “I’m extremely assured we’re going to have the ability to pour sufficient gasoline on this to assist it develop” after that work is completed, he mentioned. Meta has but to advertise Threads in Instagram or Fb or spend on advertising it. (Elon Musk has advised his workers that he needs his X super-app thought to ultimately hit 1 billion customers, too, although he has very totally different concepts for getting there.)

“We’ve tried a bunch of standalone experiences over time, and basically, we haven’t had plenty of success with standalone apps,” Zuckerberg advised buyers. “A part of me wonders if that is only a basic enterprise capital portfolio query, the place you strive a bunch of issues and a bunch of them don’t work, and on occasion, one hits… it may very well be that that is such an idiocratic case due to all of the components taking place round Twitter, or X because it’s known as now.”

Meta’s enterprise has rebounded considerably this yr, and for the second quarter, it reported better-than-expected earnings that despatched its inventory worth greater. The corporate’s whole income was $32 billion, with a web revenue of $7.78 billion. Its Actuality Labs division, in the meantime, reported a web lack of $3.7 billion. Administration warned buyers to count on these losses to “meaningfully” improve as a result of “ongoing product growth efforts” in augmented and digital actuality, just like the launch of the Quest 3 headset later this yr.

Even with these staggering losses at Actuality Labs, Meta doesn’t really feel stress to monetize Threads within the close to time period. Its established social networks — Fb, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp — have by no means been larger. Even Fb has surpassed 3 billion month-to-month customers and is rising once more within the US and Canada, the corporate introduced on Wednesday.

Whereas Twitter is scrambling to get better the advert income it has misplaced since Musk took over, Zuckerberg mentioned on the earnings name that Threads wouldn’t introduce adverts till it reaches “lots of of hundreds of thousands” of customers. “I feel we’re actually simply targeted on taking this chance, which is an superior one which we didn’t count on at this scale,” he mentioned. “It’s going to be a protracted highway forward.”