Meta is officially turning the money switch on.

The company announced Wednesday that ads are rolling out to all Threads users worldwide, marking the app’s biggest monetization step yet. The expansion begins next week and will happen gradually, with Meta warning it could take months before ads fully saturate the platform.

For Meta, this was always the plan. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been openly bullish on Threads since launch, calling it the company’s next major growth engine and suggesting it could eventually reach 1 billion users. The app hasn’t hit that milestone yet, but it has crossed 400 million monthly active users, making it too big to stay ad-free forever.

Threads has actually been warming up to advertisers for a while. A year ago, Meta began testing ads in the U.S. and Japan, then opened the platform to global advertisers last April. What’s new now is scale. Existing advertisers can automatically place ads on Threads through Meta’s Advantage+ system or manually manage campaigns alongside Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp… all from the same dashboard.

Formats include image and video ads, plus newer options like 4:5 aspect ratios and carousel ads. Meta also expanded its third-party brand safety verification (already used across Facebook and Instagram) to the Threads feed, a move that feels especially timely given the chaos engulfing its closest rival.

That rival, of course, is X. New data suggests Threads has now overtaken X in daily mobile users. As of January 7, Threads recorded 141.5 million daily active users on iOS and Android, compared with 125 million for X. While X still dominates web traffic, mobile (where most social engagement actually happens) is trending in Threads’ favor.

This doesn’t look like people rage-quitting X for a week and then crawling back. X has faced renewed scrutiny after users were found using its AI chatbot to generate non-consensual explicit images, prompting investigations in California, the U.K., the EU, India, Brazil, and beyond. That backlash has benefited alternative platforms like Bluesky… but Threads’ growth looks more structural than reactive.

Meta has been aggressively cross-promoting Threads inside Facebook and Instagram, pushing creators onto the platform, and shipping features at a rapid clip. Over the past year, Threads has added interest-based communities, better content filters, DMs, long-form posts, disappearing content, and even early tests of games. This has resulted in users signing up, and most importantly, coming back.

Meta said back in October that Threads had already reached 150 million daily users… and the numbers have kept climbing since. X still owns the desktop crowd with about 145 million daily web visits, while Threads barely registers there. In other words, Threads lives on phones, and X still rules the browser.

The company hasn’t said how frequently ads will appear, only that delivery will remain “low” at first. So I wouldn’t expect Threads to turn into an ad swamp overnight. Still, the direction is obvious. Threads has moved beyond the experiment phase and into real business territory… and for the first time, it’s expected to start paying for itself.

At the time of publishing this article, Stocks.News holds positions in Meta as mentioned in the article.