Can you make money on Threads now?

Is Threads actually big enough to make money on now?

Yes. Threads is now easily big enough to generate meaningful business for creators, even though Meta still does not pay most of them directly.

Threads recently passed 500 million monthly active users, according to Meta. That is up from roughly 400 million less than a year earlier, so the platform added another 100 million monthly users after it was already operating at huge scale.

The daily-use numbers are just as interesting. Similarweb estimated 141.5 million daily mobile users for Threads near the beginning of the year, compared with about 125 million for X on iOS and Android. X still had a big lead on the web, so Threads had not overtaken it everywhere. But mobile usage had been moving in Threads’ direction for months rather than jumping because of one short-lived event.

Meta has also reported particularly fast growth in some large markets. Time spent on Threads had increased by more than 80% year over year in South Korea and more than 130% in Japan when the company announced the 500 million-user milestone.

So audience size is no longer the real obstacle to making money on Threads. The much bigger issue today is how that attention can actually be converted into revenue.

Threads milestone	Approximate scale
Early 2025	320M monthly users
Spring 2025	350M+
Later 2025	400M
Most recently reported	500M
Recent mobile daily-use estimate	~141.5M

Does Threads pay creators for views today?

No. Threads currently has no broad program that pays ordinary creators simply because their posts generate views, replies or engagement.

This is the first thing to understand when people talk about “making money on Threads.” A creator can get hundreds of thousands or even millions of views and receive nothing directly from Meta for those impressions.

Meta did experiment with creator payments. It launched an invitation-only Threads bonus program in 2024, with individualized targets for selected creators. Some participants reported bonuses worth thousands of dollars.

That experiment ended. Engadget confirmed with Meta in 2025 that the bonus program had been discontinued, while participating creators said their payments had stopped several months earlier.

The more interesting part is what Meta did afterward. Threads kept growing, ads expanded, creator features kept arriving, but the company did not replace the bonus program with a standard view-based payout system.

So when someone says they are making $5,000 a month “from Threads” today, that money is much more likely to come from clients, sponsors, products, newsletters, affiliates or another business attached to the account.

Did Threads ads finally create revenue sharing for creators?

No. Threads ads now run much more widely, but Meta currently keeps the advertising revenue rather than sharing it broadly with creators.

Advertising has moved quickly. Meta started with a limited Threads ad test, opened the placement to eligible advertisers globally, and later expanded Threads ads to users across markets worldwide.

For advertisers, Threads is now plugged into Meta’s existing machinery. Businesses can extend Advantage+ and manually configured campaigns into the Threads feed, while Meta has been adding the same kinds of brand-safety controls already used around Facebook and Instagram advertising.

That makes Threads a much more serious commercial product than it was at launch.

Creators have not received an equivalent upgrade. There is still no standard system where an ad next to a creator’s Threads content produces a percentage of revenue for that creator.

Meta is clearly monetizing Threads now. For creators, however, advertising has so far created more evidence that the platform can become a substantial business for Meta than a new source of direct payouts.

Money connected to Threads	Who currently gets paid?
Threads feed ads	Meta
Ordinary post views	No standard creator payout
Former creator bonuses	Program ended
Sponsored posts	Creator, paid by brand
Product or service sales	Creator or business
Affiliate sales	Creator or affiliate
External subscriptions	Creator or publisher

So what are Threads creators actually getting paid for?

Threads creators are currently making money mainly from sponsorships, products, services and audiences they move elsewhere.

That produces some very different outcomes.

A humor creator might get 5 million Threads views without selling anything and earn nothing from those views. A software consultant could get a fraction of that reach, attract one $5,000 client and make real money. A newsletter writer might turn a small percentage of readers into email subscribers and monetize them for years.

This is why Threads follower counts and viral screenshots can be misleading when we try to estimate earnings. Two accounts with very similar engagement can have completely different businesses behind them.

The strongest models today usually involve sponsorships, consulting, freelance work, ecommerce, digital products, memberships, affiliate offers, newsletters, podcasts or software.

Threads gives those businesses another place to find people. How much money comes out the other end depends heavily on what the creator has to sell.

Can you make money from sponsored Threads posts?

Yes. Sponsored Threads posts can already generate income, although there is still no reliable Threads-specific rate card.

Brands have more reason to pay attention to Threads than they did a year or two ago. The app has reached 500 million monthly users, advertising is now widely available, and Meta previously reported that three quarters of Threads users followed at least one business.

Threads has also added direct messaging. Meta later expanded message requests from people a user does not follow and explicitly said this could create opportunities for creator collaborations and monetization.

What we do not have is a large, transparent dataset showing what brands typically pay for a Threads post.

That makes precise claims such as “10,000 Threads followers equals $500 per sponsorship” mostly guesswork.

Broader influencer-marketplace data gives us a better sense of the market. Collabstr analyzed more than 21,000 completed collaborations for its latest annual report and found that nearly 80% cost brands less than $300. Another 18% landed between $301 and $1,000, while only 2% exceeded $1,000.

Those numbers cover creator partnerships across platforms rather than Threads alone, so they should not be treated as Threads rates. They do show how unusual four-figure sponsorships still are across the broader creator economy.

Sponsored Threads posts can make money now. The amount depends far more on the audience, niche and brand relationship than on a standard price attached to a follower count.

Do you need a huge Threads following before brands will pay you?

No. On Threads, a commercially useful niche audience can be worth more than a much larger generic following.

Threads distributes a lot of content beyond an account’s direct followers. Meta’s own creator research found that replies account for almost half of views on the platform and that posts generating conversations are more likely to be recommended.

That gives smaller accounts more chances to appear in front of people who have never followed them.

The audience itself then becomes crucial. A cybersecurity specialist reaching 8,000 security professionals could be more useful to a cybersecurity company than an entertainment account reaching 80,000 loosely defined followers.

The same logic becomes even stronger when the creator sells something expensive.

A consultant charging $5,000 for a project does not need thousands of buyers. A creator earning $10 for each affiliate sale does.

Follower count alone is therefore a weak way to judge whether a Threads account can make money. Who follows the account and what those people might buy often tell us much more.

Can Threads actually send people to a website, newsletter or podcast?

Yes. Threads has become much better at sending its audience toward things creators own elsewhere.

Meta now lets creators add multiple profile links and see more information about link performance. Threads also supports text attachments of up to 10,000 characters, and those attachments can lead readers toward the full article, newsletter or other external work.

Meta was unusually explicit about the purpose of that feature. Its own examples included writers previewing longer articles and authors promoting books.

The newest podcast features push this further. Podcast creators can now display their shows prominently on Threads, turn episode links into richer cards, share transcript and guest cards, remind followers about new episodes and see how much reach, clicking, saving and engagement Threads generates for the podcast.

That is one of the freshest clues about where Meta sees creator monetization going.

Instead of paying a podcaster because a Threads post receives 200,000 views, Meta is building tools that help those views produce podcast listeners.

The same model works for newsletters. A writer can use Threads for discovery, move interested readers onto an email list and then make money through subscriptions, sponsorships, advertisements, courses or products without depending on Threads afterward.

A million Threads impressions obviously do not become a million visitors. But the platform now gives creators much better tools for turning some of that attention into traffic they can monetize elsewhere.

Is Threads good for selling your own product or service?

Yes. Selling your own product or service is currently one of the strongest ways to make money from Threads.

The reason is simple: high-value sales need surprisingly little traffic.

Imagine a consultant charging $3,000 for a project. One additional client sourced through Threads creates $3,000 in revenue.

For comparison, if a hypothetical social platform paid $1 per thousand monetized views, that same $3,000 would require 3 million monetized views. Threads does not currently offer that $1 payout; the example simply shows how different the economics become when each customer is worth much more.

Software creates a similar effect. A founder selling a $100 monthly subscription needs 10 new customers to create $1,000 in monthly recurring revenue. Someone receiving a $10 affiliate commission needs 100 sales to make the same amount.

That makes Threads particularly interesting for consultants, agencies, recruiters, founders, freelancers and other people selling relatively valuable services.

They do not need millions of followers. They need the right people to notice them.

Can you make affiliate money on Threads?

Yes. Affiliate marketing can work on Threads today, particularly when posts attract people who are already close to buying something.

Reach alone will not tell us much about affiliate revenue.

A funny post about running shoes could travel widely while producing almost no purchases. A much smaller comparison between two marathon shoes could send highly interested runners toward an affiliate link.

That gap between attention and intent is huge.

Suppose an affiliate offer pays $20 per sale. Fifty purchases produce $1,000. If 2% of qualified visitors eventually buy, the creator would need about 2,500 qualified visits.

That 2% is an example rather than a Threads benchmark. Meta does not publish a universal Threads purchase-conversion rate, and we could not find a credible dataset large enough to establish one.

So affiliate income on Threads is clearly possible, but anyone presenting one precise “Threads conversion rate” for every creator, niche and product is pretending the data is much cleaner than it really is.

Does Threads punish posts with external links?

There is no solid evidence that Threads currently applies a blanket penalty to posts simply because they contain an external link.

Meta’s own product decisions actually point in the other direction. Threads added long-form text attachments that can include links specifically so creators can promote work hosted elsewhere. The newest podcast tools also turn external episode links into richer cards and track the clicks those links generate.

That would be an odd set of features to build if all outbound links were meant to be buried automatically.

Link posts can still perform differently from conversation-first posts. Someone who clicks away from Threads is behaving differently from someone who replies, reposts or stays inside a discussion, and Threads says conversation-generating posts are more likely to be recommended.

So filling an account with repetitive “click here” promotions is unlikely to be a great growth strategy.

But that is different from proving that Threads deliberately suppresses external links across the board. Current product development shows that Meta wants at least some creators to send people toward work outside the app.

Are replies really that important for growing and making money on Threads?

Yes. Replies are one of the most important ways to get discovered on Threads, especially when an account is still small.

Meta found that replies account for almost half of all Threads views. Its creator guidance also says posts that drive conversations are more likely to be recommended.

That makes Threads unusually useful for people who can contribute something valuable to conversations that already have an audience.

A newsletter consultant replying to a discussion about email deliverability, for example, reaches people who have already shown interest in the exact problem that consultant solves.

The creator did not have to build the original audience first.

Meta also found that higher posting frequency was associated with higher impressions per post and suggested posting around two to five times a week for creators trying to grow. But the reply statistic is arguably more useful because it explains where a large part of Threads discovery actually happens.

For a small expert account, a smart reply in the right conversation can be more valuable than publishing another generic standalone post.

Is it still easy to grow on Threads now?

Threads still gives new accounts plenty of discovery opportunities, although we would no longer call it an “early” platform.

The app has 500 million monthly users. That is already mass-market scale.

What remains relatively immature is how communities and discovery work. Meta has continued expanding topic-based Communities, Live Chats and recommendation controls such as Dear Algo and Your Algo, which let users influence what appears in their feeds.

More than a third of daily Threads users with connections also follow mostly different accounts on Threads than on Instagram, according to Meta. That is important because it suggests Threads has developed its own social graph rather than functioning only as an extension of Instagram.

The discovery system increasingly rewards clear interests too. An account consistently posting about SaaS pricing, running, books or beauty gives Threads much more information about who might care than an account jumping randomly between unrelated subjects.

So there is still room to establish a strong position inside a niche. The “nobody is here yet” phase is long gone, but many parts of the creator economy are still less entrenched than they are on Instagram or YouTube.

Which creators are most likely to make money on Threads now?

Creators with expertise or something valuable to sell are currently in the strongest position on Threads.

Writers fit naturally because Threads is text-heavy and now supports longer text attachments. Consultants and freelancers can turn useful conversations into leads. Founders can speak directly with potential customers. Newsletter operators can convert followers into email subscribers. Affiliate publishers can target high-intent discussions.

Podcasters have become especially interesting lately.

Meta has just rolled out podcast profile banners, richer episode links, transcript cards, guest cards, new-episode reminders and dedicated Podcast Insights measuring reach, engagement, clicks and saves.

That is a surprisingly large amount of product work around one creator category.

It also tells us something about Meta’s current approach to Threads creators: help them find an audience, then help that audience discover the creator’s actual business or content product.

Generic viral accounts have a harder job. They can certainly attract reach and sponsorships, but a large audience without clear buying intent or another product attached to it gives the creator fewer ways to turn that attention into money.

Can a normal business make money on Threads too?

Yes. Threads can now produce customers and advertising reach for ordinary businesses, not just full-time creators.

The paid side has matured quickly. Threads ads are available to advertisers globally and can be added to existing Meta campaigns rather than requiring businesses to build an entirely separate advertising operation.

Meta has also been bringing more of its established advertising infrastructure onto Threads. Its brand-safety controls now work with partners including DoubleVerify, Integral Ad Science, Scope3 and Zefr.

According to independent measurement cited by Meta, more than 99% of content shown beside ads across the relevant Facebook, Instagram and Threads feed environments met those partners’ brand-safety standards.

Organic Threads activity gives companies a second route.

A founder can answer customer questions, a software business can join discussions around the problem it solves, and a consumer brand can build familiarity before asking somebody to buy.

For many businesses today, the useful question is broader than whether Threads pays creators. Threads can already make a company money even when Meta sends that company no creator check at all.

Is Threads better for making money than X right now?

It depends on how you make money, because X currently has a clearer native creator-payout system while Threads has become a very large mobile distribution channel.

X recently retired its old Creator Revenue Sharing program and started rolling out Original Content Rewards. The new program pays eligible creators for qualifying original content, subject to X’s eligibility and approval rules.

That gives X something Threads currently lacks: an explicit path from content performance to a payment from the platform itself.

Threads is competing much more aggressively on audience.

Similarweb estimated 141.5 million daily Threads users on iOS and Android versus 125 million for X during a recent measurement period. X remained much bigger on the web, so neither number alone settles the overall audience comparison.

As we saw earlier, Threads has also reached 500 million monthly users.

Someone who primarily wants to earn directly from posts therefore gets a clearer proposition from X today. Someone using text-based social media to find clients, newsletter subscribers, podcast listeners or customers can potentially make money on either platform, and Threads now offers a very large audience for doing that.

Monetization feature	Threads	X
Direct creator rewards for qualifying content	No broad program	Yes, for approved eligible creators
Native ads	Yes	Yes
External links	Yes	Yes
Sponsored posts	Possible	Possible
Native paid creator products	Limited	More developed
Large text-based discovery audience	Yes	Yes

Is Threads better for making money than Instagram?

No. Instagram still has a much more complete native creator economy than Threads.

Instagram creators can use subscriptions, gifts, branded-content tools and Meta’s Creator Marketplace, among other monetization features. Brands can already discover creators, send partnership opportunities and run established influencer campaigns there.

Threads is far less developed on that front.

Collabstr’s most recent marketplace data shows how mature Instagram influencer marketing has become. Instagram accounted for about 40% of campaigns on its platform, and brands paid an average of $193 per completed Instagram creator collaboration.

There is no comparable large Threads marketplace dataset yet.

That does not make Threads useless for someone who already has an Instagram business. The two can complement each other quite well: Threads can create text-based conversations and discovery, while Instagram handles formats and monetization products that Threads still lacks.

But if we are judging only the built-in ways a creator can get paid, Instagram currently wins very easily.

Can AI automation turn Threads into passive income?

No. AI can make running a Threads account cheaper, but there is no automatic income stream waiting for people who flood the platform with generated posts.

Threads now supports scheduling, drafts, an API and third-party publishing tools, so creators and businesses can operate accounts much more efficiently than they could around launch.

Meta’s own data still points toward original, conversational material.

The company says top-performing creators tend to make content specifically for Threads, while posts that generate conversations are more likely to be recommended.

That makes the familiar “generate 50 AI posts every day and collect passive income” pitch especially weak on Threads. There is no standard view payout to harvest in the first place.

AI can help repurpose research, schedule posts or speed up production. But trust, expertise, audience relevance and having something worth buying still have to come from somewhere.

How much money can a normal person realistically make on Threads?

There is no credible average Threads income today, and any neat number would hide how differently people actually monetize the platform.

Meta cannot give us an average payout because there is no broad creator payout program. We also do not have a representative marketplace showing the median amount earned from Threads sponsorships, and sales generated on external websites are mostly invisible.

So the realistic range starts at zero.

Someone can build a large Threads audience, sell nothing and have no sponsors, producing plenty of engagement but no income.

Another person could have a much smaller account and win one $2,000 freelance contract. A creator might make a few hundred dollars from a brand collaboration. A SaaS founder could acquire customers worth thousands of dollars over their lifetime.

Those are fundamentally different businesses, which is why “average Threads creator income” is not particularly useful.

A more practical number to track is how much revenue a Threads-generated lead, subscriber or customer is worth to you.

Will Meta eventually start paying Threads creators directly?

Maybe, but there is still no strong reason to assume broad Threads payouts are definitely coming.

Meta certainly could build them. Threads now has 500 million monthly users, advertising is live, and Meta already knows how to run creator monetization programs across its other apps.

The company has also already tested direct Threads bonuses, so paying creators is hardly a foreign idea.

Yet the way Meta has spent its effort since ending those bonuses is telling. It has built Communities, recommendation controls, messaging, Live Chats, advertising tools, long-form attachments and, most recently, an unusually detailed set of podcast promotion and analytics features.

Broad creator revenue sharing still has not appeared.

For now, Meta seems comfortable letting Threads generate attention while creators monetize some of that attention through brands, customers or assets they own elsewhere.

That could change. But a Threads business that only becomes viable after Meta starts paying for views is built around something Meta has not actually promised.

So, can you make money on Threads now?

Yes. Threads can already make creators and businesses real money, but the strongest opportunities currently come from converting its audience rather than getting paid by Meta for views.

Threads has crossed 500 million monthly users. Recent Similarweb data put its mobile daily audience above X during the measured period. Ads have expanded globally, direct messaging is established, external-link tools have improved, and Meta is still shipping creator features at a fast pace.

The newest podcast rollout makes the direction particularly clear. Threads can now help a creator promote episodes, surface guests and transcripts, send listeners outward and measure clicks and saves. Similar tools already help writers promote longer work and external links.

At the same time, the direct-payout picture remains weak. Meta ended the earlier Threads bonus program, has not introduced a broad ad-revenue share, and still offers far fewer native monetization products than Instagram. X now has an Original Content Rewards system that gives approved creators a direct payout route Threads lacks.

So the answer depends heavily on what sits behind the Threads account.

Someone hoping to post viral content and receive a reliable check from Meta has little to work with today. A consultant, freelancer, founder, ecommerce seller, affiliate publisher, newsletter writer, podcaster or creator with sponsorship demand has a much stronger case.

Threads has become a serious place to find attention. The people making the most useful money from that attention are generally the ones who already know what they want to sell once they get it.