Meta is Introducing Ads on Threads in the US and Japan

Meta has started testing ads on Threads, its Twitter/X alternative that recently crossed 300 million monthly active users worldwide. The company is starting with a “small test” in the US and Japan, and the Instagram team that’s currently developing Threads plans to monitor user feedback before expanding ads to other markets.

“We know there will be plenty of feedback about how we should approach ads, and we are making sure they feel like Threads posts you’d find relevant and interesting,” explained head of Instagram Adam Mosseri in a Threads post. “We’ll closely monitoring this test before scaling it more broadly, with the goal of getting ads on Threads to a place where they are as interesting as organic content.”

Ads are core to Meta’s business model, and Threads probably has a big enough audience to get advertisers on board. “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,” the exec said at the time,” Mosseri said back in April 2024.

Facebook and Instagram, Meta’s two other big platforms are pretty much filled with ads and sponsored posts today, and it will be interesting to see if Threads eventually gets the same treatment. During the testing period, a small percentage of Threads users in the US and Japan will see image ads with a “Sponsored” label between posts in the Threads home feed. For now, ads will only appear in the Thread mobile apps.

“We will also provide people with controls on the ads they see in Threads to understand how their information is used for ads and controls to change their experience,” Meta said today. “For example, if people see an ad they don’t like, they can skip the ad, or tap the menu on the post to hide or report it.”

If other social platforms such as Twitter or Reddit allow users to pay for an ad-free experience, Meta currently only offers this alternative in the EU. The company originally launched its ad-free subscription in the region in the fall of 2023 to comply with the EU’s Digital Markets Act. However, to please local regulators, the company still needed to provide a way for Facebook and Instagram users in the EU to use these services for free with less personalized ads, and it did so in November.

Ads aren’t the only new thing coming to Threads at the beginning of 2025. Earlier this month, Meta announced that it was replacing fact-checkers with a crowdsourced Community Notes system, starting in the US. Meta is also removing restrictions on topics like immigration and gender, and it’s bringing back political content to its platforms.

Update 4:35 PM ET: I updated the post with more information about how ads will appear on Threads and how users can hide or report them.