Meta starts a ‘small test’ of ads in Threads

In its year and a half of existence, one of the things that sets Threads apart from other Meta apps is that the service has been completely free of the advertising that fills almost every corner of Facebook and Instagram. That is now about to change. Meta is starting its first “small test” of ads on Threads, Instagram director Adam Mosseri as the company finally seeks to start making money from the service.

The ads will appear as image posts among content in users’ feeds and will appear only to “a small percentage of people” in the United States and Japan. According to Mosseri, Meta plans to start with “a handful of brands” in the two countries. “We know there will be a lot of feedback about how we should approach the ads, and we’re making sure they feel like Threads posts that you find relevant and interesting,” he wrote. “We’ll follow this test closely before expanding it more broadly, with the goal of taking ads on Threads to a place where they’re as engaging as organic content.”

It appears that Meta is using their existing advertising infrastructure to bring ads to the app. in a the company explains that brands can “extend their existing meta ad campaigns to Threads, without the need for custom creatives or additional resources, simply by checking a box in Ads Manager.” The company will also test its “” in Threads, which “allows advertisers to control the sensitivity level of the organic content their ads appear next to.” This will likely be an important feature for marketers as it targets their content moderation guidelines and once again allows it to appear more in user recommendations.

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