Facebook-owned Instagram hit the 400 million mark today. The photo-sharing sharing app posted a celebratory picture and stated that the 400 million strong user base has about 75 percent living outside the US.
“Among the last 100 million to join, more than half live in Europe and Asia. The countries that added the most Instagrammers include Brazil, Japan and Indonesia”
The new 100 million users helped Instagram race ahead of twitter, which is currently at 316 million active monthly users. Facebook is surely reaping from the benefits from buying Instagram for $1 billion in 2012 now that Instagram has also taken to advertising. Research firm eMarketer estimated that Instagram’s ad revenue will reach about $1.5 billion in 2016 and $2.8 billion in 2017. Instagram has credited Facebook for the rise in users.
The recent option that allows for portrait and landscape photos along with your standard square pictures has received positive response from existing users and has surely played an integral part to rope in more people. Instagram also made changes to its Direct messages page last month which now allows threaded messages. Pictures can be sent privately without having to start a new thread every time.
Instagram poses as a strong competitor to Twitter. Both social media platforms are slowly delving into territories that are blurring the differences between them. Twitter had announced recently that it plans to hand-curate live event coverage in a project called Lightning. However, Instagram already launched new live events features in its Explore page back in June. While Twitter is turning more visual, Instagram is focusing more on events.
Despite some major improvements, Instagram is far from perfect. The main feed has not seen any improvement for a long time now. The main feed show pictures that are too big to navigate properly. An overview of popular pictures that you missed would be ideal. None of these constraints, however, have come in the way of Instagram reaching 400 million followers.
Leave a Reply