In the first quarter of this year, Newsweek recorded its highest daily social traffic in the past five years, with Threads standing out in particular. According to Digiday, referral traffic from Threads has increased 20-fold since January. Although Newsweek has over 3.5 million followers on X and only 160,000 on Threads, the latter is currently driving more traffic -pointing to a shift in the social media landscape.
Other publishers are seeing similar growth. Published figures show that Forbes increased its posting frequency at the beginning of the year and has seen a 711% increase in traffic. Politico recorded its highest number of referral clicks from Threads in February, and March brought an additional 50% increase, while one anonymous publisher reported a 677% monthly increase, with hundreds of posts per day on the platform.
These results come after Meta changed its approach to media content at the beginning of the year – following years of deprioritizing publishers, including removing the News tab and Instant Articles, political and social issue content is once again being shown more frequently in users’ feeds.
Meta has also introduced new features on Threads, such as topic tags and personalized content controls, further boosting the visibility of posts. The biggest growth has occurred precisely after publishers began posting more frequently – some as often as multiple times per hour.
However, despite the impressive percentage increases, Threads still accounts for a small portion of overall traffic. Newsweek notes that social platforms altogether generate less than 10% of its total traffic, while Threads makes up a single-digit share of the referral mix for most other publishers.
‘We don’t want to repeat the mistakes of 2018 when we relied too heavily on algorithm-driven sources. Our focus is on bringing audiences back to our own platforms‘, Newsweek said.
For marketing and media professionals, these trends raise important questions: Can Threads become a sustainable audience channel and is it worth long-term investment? Or is this just another short-lived algorithmic spike that will vanish with the next feed update?
Publishers currently seeing growth are riding the wave – but with caution.
