It took Facebook almost seven years to hit 500 million users but Instagram could achieve this milestone in less than six years. This highly popular photo-sharing app today boasts of 500 million users. Instagram’s 80 percent of the users are all from outside the USA. The statistics reveal that Instagram’s growth has chiefly been accounted for, by its popularity in overseas nations such as France, Germany, Japan and Indonesia.
Instagram today takes immense pride in its 300 million active users per day. Though 300 million is quite an impressive figure, according to the reports from CNBC, Instagram usage has in reality dropped by 23.7 percent between the current year and the previous one. So it may be pointed out that even though Instagram has been successful in achieving a wider audience per day; its users seem to be spending less time on the platform.
Instagram Photo-sharing Is Coming Down
The CEO and co-founder of Instagram, Mr. Kevin Systrom seems to be quite happy with the progress of this successful photo sharing platform. Instagram has 95 million posts and images shared every day from users practically all across the globe. This is considered to be a wonderful achievement because Instagram’s objective was to come up with a community and not simply a photo-sharing app. It is believed that today people are gradually posting a less number of pictures on Instagram. During the period 2013 and 2015, the number of pictures shared on the platform by each Instagram user seems to have dropped.
Instagram Is Not Losing Its Popularity
The gradual decline in Instagram sharing, however, does not imply that its overall popularity is actually going down. This much-loved Facebook-owned photo-sharing app just hit 500 million users. However, the current trend seems to be suggesting that more and more people are beginning to share more on other competing apps such as Snapchat that has 150 million daily users.
Instagram has been experimenting and trying out new techniques for encouraging and boosting engagement like push notifications are sent if someone posts after quite a while. Instagram recently switched over to actually an algorithmic feed because one of the primary reasons was to entice and inspire people to see it and comment on even more photos. Instagram recently announced with great pleasure that its community has now grown to 500 million instagrammers. There are more than 300 active users every day and they spend mostly 21 minutes in the app every day. Visit instamacro.com for all your Instagram solutions.
Reports in April stated that Facebook too had been witnessing such drops in original sharing of posts. Unsurprisingly, Facebook released a new algorithm for the News Feed to prioritize friends’ posts over those of pages.
Instagram, however, looks to be in some trouble. The projected ad revenue for 2016 is $1.48 billion, and for 2017 is around $2.81 billion. While these are very impressive figures, concerns have been raised both by users and market experts regarding its dominance due to the emergence of new mobile-first social platforms such as Snapchat. Snapchat has swiftly and mercurially grown into the most popular social photo service among young users, with more than 100 million people using it daily, and mostly being under the age of 35.
Instagram seems to be brainstorming the platform and its scope and trying to introduce and integrate new products like reposting, 360-degree video, live video etc. They are very confident about the growth and engagement rates among the Instagram community, and have stated that on average, each Instagram user spends at least 21 minutes on the app daily. They are also delighted with the response their supplementary products like Layout and Boomerang and services like Instagram Explore, Direct and Video have received by users and critics alike.