It’s Threads’ first Friday, and it feels as though the “first day of school” vibe that characterized the app’s euphoric launch has shifted ever so slightly.

To stick with the metaphor, users and creators seem to have moved into Threads’ proverbial auditorium for the talent show on Meta’s text-based app: Everyone is there, they’ve settled in, and they’re ready to experience all of the joy and all of the cringe.

“WHY AM I CHECKING THREADS FIRST THING WHEN I WAKE UP HELPPPP,” YouTube’s leading Shorts creator Alan Chikin Chow wrote in a Threads post this morning.

“Me canceling my weekend plans to be in this unhinged chat room,” writes meme account MyTherapistSays in another post from the same time. 

From a business standpoint, Meta seems to have graduated from its stock-tanking Metaverse days. By allowing people to keep their Instagram followers on Threads, the social network became the most rapidly downloaded app ever. Right now, Threads is on pace to exceed over 100 million users in two months, according to SimilarWeb, per the New York Times. The stock price, too, has risen by 11% in the past month, and many are speculating Threads will kill Twitter. 

Creators interviewed by Fortune, who don’t consider Twitter a top platform in their monetization and audience strategies, are very excited about the potential to tap Threads for both fan engagement and monetization down the line. 

“It’s better than Twitter already because of the main page algorithm, and it’s fresh and exciting haha,” Peet Montzingo, who has over 13 million YouTube subscribers, wrote in a text to me. “Honestly, I feel like as soon as ads are incorporated then it’ll be the real test.”

As Montzingo notes, advertising and monetization remain pressing issues for creators and agencies alike. Right now, Threads does not have ads—a certain contributor to the app’s wide-eyed freshman energy—but agencies are preparing strategies to attract client business when the platform inevitably monetizes. Joe Gagliese, cofounder and CEO of influencer agency Viral Nation, tells Fortune that his strategy team is “all over it” to find opportunities for brands deriving value from Threads.

“Brands for a long time have seen the value of advertising through Twitter, especially in a paid capacity,” Gagliese adds. “But that channel has obviously changed for a lot of brands—so there’s a lot of potential economy that can be built around text from a marketing and programmatic perspective.”

For brands to benefit from advertising on Threads, the platform needs to be filled with primo organic content. Now that rival platforms like YouTube and TikTok are paying larger-scale creators for contributions, Threads already is facing stiff competition.

This is especially significant as Meta has a mixed record in compensating creators. “Meta has taken away monetization on almost all of their other platforms, so as a creator it’s not something I’m holding my breath for,” Dalton Brock (Esportscenter), who reports making $3,000 and $6,000 per month from TikTok’s Creativity Program Beta, told me over text. 

Still, creators seem excited to tap Threads for both audience interaction and future monetization. The group of creators I interviewed—all have at least 600,000 Instagram followers and work as full-time social media influencers—had not been compensated to join or post on Threads at the time of launch. These creators are less interested in Meta paying them for their contributions than they are to use the platform to bolster their audiences and subsequently sweeten brand partnerships. 

“I’m focusing on just building the audience and figuring out what works and what doesn’t,” says Adam Waheed, who, with 12.8 million YouTube subscribers and 6 million on Instagram, was invited to Threads prelaunch and became its 242nd user. The comedic video star now has 344,000 followers on the platform. “I will always be able to monetize off a platform if I have a following on there—it might not be directly, but it’ll be very lucrative, in my opinion.”

More news below.

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Alexandra Sternlicht

Data Sheet’s daily news section was written and curated by David Meyer.

NEWSWORTHY

Amazon’s iRobot barrier. The European Commission’s antitrust directorate has opened an in-depth investigation of Amazon’s $1.7 billion takeover of vacuum maker iRobot. The Commission is concerned that an iRobot-owning Amazon could stop selling or otherwise hamper the prospects of other robotic vacuum cleaners on its retail site—and maybe prevent those rivals from accessing its Alexa API. The U.S. FTC has yet to announce whether it will launch a formal investigation of the deal, which received U.K. approval last month.

Samsung’s profit warning. Samsung’s Q2 profits are likely to be 96% down year over year, the South Korean electronic giant has warned. It’s all down to memory chips. As CNBC reports, device manufacturers stockpiled the chips during the pandemic-era computing boom—before the current era of inflation put a serious dent in consumer electronics purchases. Samsung’s the leading maker of memory chips, so…oof.

Ant Group’s fine. The fintech giant Ant Group has been whacked with one of China’s biggest-ever tech fines, totaling 7.12 billion yuan ($984 million). As Reuters explains, this is perceived as a good thing for the Jack Ma–founded firm, because it means its yearslong spell in regulatory purgatory is over, and it can now do things like getting properly licensed and working toward the IPO it was hoping to hold in late 2020, before Beijing cracked down.

SIGNIFICANT FIGURES

16

—The number of car manufacturers that yesterday pledged not to “disrupt fair competition with abnormal pricing” in the Chinese electric vehicle market. EV sales have been slowing there (and in the U.S.) with the result being a price war between Tesla and its local rivals. Elon Musk’s outfit was one of the 16 that agreed to the truce, and to uphold “core socialist values.” But a day later, Tesla announced a new $480 cash rebate for some Chinese customers.

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

Binance plunges into crisis as senior execs quit over CEO Changpeng Zhao’s response to Justice Department investigation, by Jeff John Roberts

Twitter owner Elon Musk has taken first steps in creating an ‘everything app’ to rival WeChat. It’s going to be an uphill battle, by Leo Schwartz and Kylie Robison

Twitter is threatening to sue Instagram parent company Meta over its launch of Threads, report says, by Kylie Robison

Goldman Sachs analysts argue the A.I. hype is real: ‘This feels very different from previous tech bubbles,’ by Will Daniel

The thumbs-up emoji just got some legal clout. A judge ruled it’s as valid as a signature on a contract, by Eleanor Pringle

BEFORE YOU GO

Grooving in virtual reality. The idea of VR music creation is not new (virtual synthesizers such as Synthspace and SynthVR have been around for a few years now) but now one of the electronic-music world’s big beasts has entered the arena. Japan’s Korg has finally released its long-trailed Gadget VR music studio, which may tempt quite a few musos into trying out VR for the first time—an interesting development for a space that’s often seen as being more about consumption than production.

The app, which works on the Meta Quest 2 and Pro, brings together six virtual devices that include a drum machine, a bass synth, and four other types of synthesizer. Here’s Robin Vincent of Gearnews: “I’ve played with a few music apps on the Meta Quest 2. But I’ve not seen an adventure playground of interconnection synths and drum machines mapped out in VR space quite like this. It’s stunning.” However, “fatigue is a real problem when using VR apps, particularly when you are attempting to do some very precise handling of controls.”