Sew, Threads seams like a winner 🧵

30 million users in 24 hours leaves Zuck smiling and 🤯

Emily Burton
July 07, 2023

Happy Friday! The 2010s are making a comeback with the arrival of an Angry Birds cafe and an updated Shazam app that can identify your favorite TikTok songs.

WATCH OUT, TWITTER 👀

Meta’s “Twitter killer” scooped up 30 million users in just 24 hours

Threads has been alive for less than two days—but according to Mark Zuckerberg, the new app needed only 24 hours to snag 30 million users.That one-day total already adds up to roughly 15% of Twitter’s daily active user base.

Whether those users will actually stick around remains to be seen, but Meta definitely isn’t making it easy for new arrivals to duck out. As many users have now discovered, you can’t delete your Threads profile without also deleting your Instagram account. That catch is tied into Meta’s vision for its Twitter-like app, which is meant to operate as Instagram’s text counterpart:

“Our vision is that Threads will be a new app more focused on text and dialogue, modeled after what Instagram has done for photo and video.”

Meta spokesperson

That being said, Threads isn’t actually limited to text-based posts. Its content options are a close imitation of Twitter’s: in addition to text posts up to 500 characters long, users can upload photos, URLs, and videos under 5 minutes.

Of course, Threads is doing some things differently.

Unlike Twitter, Threads doesn’t allow you to sort your feed chronologically or limit your Threads timeline to people you follow (meaning you might end up seeing a lot of MrBeast, who’s already dominating the app with over 2.5 million followers).

Meta also hopes to differentiate its new app from Twitter by creating a more inviting atmosphere. As Zuckerberg posted (threaded?), “the goal is to keep it friendly as it expands…that’s one reason why Twitter never succeeded as much as I think it should have, and we want to do it differently.”

HEADLINES IN BRIEF 📰

MrBeast’s primary YouTube channel scored a whopping 1.3 billion monthly views in June, making the challenge-focused hub the #5 most-viewed channel in the U.S. (Tubefilter)
Twitter has threatened to sue Meta for allegedly misappropriating “Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property” to develop its new app, Threads. (Gizmodo)
TikTok’s subscription-based music streaming service, TikTok Music, has arrived in Brazil and Indonesia. (TechCrunch)
SAG-AFTRA (aka The Screen Actors Guild - American Federation of Television and Radio Artists) is reportedly gearing up for a “potential TV/theatrical/streaming strike." (Deadline)

DATA • U.S. TOP 50 📈

From comedy skits to exploding coke bottles, this Shorts star’s content is always a surprise

You might know FunnyMike (aka MacArthur Johnson) from his days as a cast member on the competitive sketch show Wild N’ Out. But if you haven’t scrolled through the videos on his Shorts channel, do you really know him?

After rising to fame as a musical comedian, Johnson has leveraged his short-form channel to diversify his image. Funny clips and music videos are still a vibrant part of his YouTube hub, but the Shorts star has also pulled in millions of views by uploading heartwarming reunions, family-friendly pranks, and good old-fashioned science experiments.

All that variation has earned Johnson a wide audience.

The comedian’s channel—which also includes the long-form fare his oldest fans know and love—has accumulated more than 3 billion views since its launch in 2016. A huge portion of that lifetime total comes from Shorts views, as exemplified by the performance of Johnson’s top clips: while the YouTuber’s #1 video claims 21 million views, his most popular Short has soared past 180 million views.

Scoring hundreds of millions of views is nothing new for Johnson.

Johnson collected more than 320 million views in June. Data from Gospel Stats.

Over the course of our last seven-day count, the Shorts star more than doubled his viewership week-over-week.
Johnson’s seven-day total: 215 million weekly views.
Altogether, that sky-high seven-day total rocketed the YouTuber’s channel to 18th place in our U.S. Top 50 chart.

WATCH THIS 📺

Olivia Rodrigo’s new single is already a hit on social media

Olivia Rodrigo became a Gen Z icon following the release of her first album, with songs like “Good 4 U” and “Deja Vu” appearing as sounds in millions of TikTok videos. Now, the former Disney star has released the first single from her second album, Guts.

After a week on YouTube, the music video for “Vampire” has already soared past 22 million views. Whether it will reach the same success as the music video for “Driver’s License” (which currently claims 460 million views on Rodrigo’s channel) remains to be seen—but for now, it looks like fans are still plenty invested in the former Disney star.

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Today's newsletter is from: Emily Burton, Sam Gutelle, and Josh Cohen. Drew Baldwin helped edit, too. It's a team effort.