Executive Briefing
What Amazon really wants
Also: Threads’ huge debut, how Nike grows the pie, and the Gjelina Group’s first hotel.
By Dan Frommer on Saturday, July 8, 2023 at 8:00 am
This week’s unlikely hero: Mark Zuckerberg, who is taking victory laps while his new Twitter clone, Threads, is on pace to pass 100 million sign-ups in its first week. (After launching Wednesday, it passed 70 million on Friday morning.) For context, this time last year, Twitter had almost 240 million daily active users.
The Threads launch worked for a number of reasons: Very low signup friction (it’s built on top of Instagram, which has more than 2 billion users and a well-tuned social graph), a familiar format (tweets), and a day-one feeling of vitality. This simply isn’t the case for most new social platforms. Network effects are real!
Threads also has the benefit of Twitter’s ongoing self-destruction, both as a bit of a toxic cesspool — mostly our own fault, will get to that — and its lame corporate situation under Elon Musk, which has become a big part of Twitter’s narrative.
(Some of you may remember this, but one of the major reasons that Facebook worked so well was because the services it copied in the mid-aughts — Friendster and MySpace — were increasingly slow, messy, and unreliable. If Threads can stay fast and fun, and if Twitter keeps shooting itself in the foot, there is a lane for it.)
Two big questions now are:
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