Meta begins a ‘small test’ of ads on Threads

In its year-and-a-half of existence, one of the things that’s set Threads apart from Meta’s other apps is that the service has been entirely free of the advertising that fills up just about every corner of Facebook and Instagram. That’s now about to change. Meta is beginning its first “small test” of ads on Threads, Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced, as the company looks to finally start making money off the service.

The ads will appear as image posts in between content in users’ feeds and will show up only for “a small percentage of people” in the US and Japan. According to Mosseri, Meta plans to begin with “a handful of brands” in the two countries. “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,” he wrote. “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.”

It seems that Meta is using its existing advertising infrastructure to bring ads to the app. In a blog post, the company explains that brands can “extend their existing Meta ad campaigns to Threads—without the need for bespoke creative or additional resourcing—by simply checking a box in Ads Manager.” The company will also test its “inventory filter” on Threads, which “allows advertisers to control the sensitivity level of the organic content their ads appear next to.” That will likely be an important feature for marketers as Meta loosens its content moderation guidelines and once again allows more political content to appear in users’ recommendations.

Though the initial test is small, using its existing ad tools would enable Meta to scale Threads ads to many more advertisers, and its 300 million users, very quickly in the future. Mark Zuckerberg has previously indicated that he preferred a slow approach to building Threads’ ad business. “All these new products, we ship them, and then there's a multi-year time horizon between scaling them and then scaling them into not just consumer experiences but very large businesses,” the CEO said last year.

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