The leading photo and video sharing app, Instagram has joined the elite league of social media apps like Facebook, WeChat, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. Recently, the five and a half years old company surpassed 500 million monthly active users. The company also revealed that over 300 million users use the app daily.
Interestingly, only 100 million of the monthly active users of Instagram belong to the US while a whopping 80% belongs to non-US countries. Kevin Systrom, CEO of Instagram, when asked about his feelings on global adoption of the app, said that images are a universal language. And, he is quite right with his thoughts as one picture is worth a thousand words.
Kevin Systrom in an interview with Forbes, appeared quite amused citing the numbers and said such milestones are rare and only a few companies are able to record 500 million monthly active users.
“This scale is not a badge on our uniform, but a signal of our ambition. If we can have a billion or a billion and a half on Instagram, we get closer to capturing every single experience in the world.” Systrom said in an interview with Forbes.
The user engagement on Instagram is quite high, On a daily basis, about 95+ million photos and videos are being uploaded and, on an average, 4.2 billion likes are accounted by the company. The company recorded a considerable 25% growth in monthly user base from September 2015 when it had 400 million monthly active users. The future of Instagram appears warm as profound analysts are forecasting $572.5 million revenue for Instagram in Q1 2016.
Instagram offers various state-of-the-art features that make it stand out of the crowd. The app uses a number of filters to enhance the image quality, we can send posts from the feed to our friends, we can link other social media accounts like upload here pose everywhere. We can also view our posts on a world map showing the places we have posted our photos.
Even Pope Francis @franciscus has an account on Instagram apart from many other famous celebrities across the globe. Selena Gomez @selenagomez, US pop star is the most followed celebrity on the photo sharing the app with 85.4 million followers, followed by another US pop star, Taylor Swift @taylorswift with 82.5 million followers.
That’s why Facebook bought it
Instagram started as a photo-sharing app for photographers gradually carved its way to general public and was launched on October 6th, 2010. In a matter of hours since its launch, tens of thousands of new users downloaded the app and within a month of the launch, Instagram recorded 1 million user base.
Citing the market potential of the company, Facebook has bought Instagram in April 2012 for a whopping $1 billion. Instagram was 2 years and 2 months old company with 14 employees then.
The other social media Majors
Astonishingly, the social media giant Facebook owns top social media apps like Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Facebook has a huge 1.65 billion monthly active users and around 54% of the users access the app from their mobile devices. Facebook Messengers has 900 million monthly active users as of April 2016, according to Statista. Whereas Facebook’s biggest bet, WhatsApp boasts a whopping 1 billion active users.
The competitors of Instagram include Chinese social Media App WeChat has around 700 million monthly active users. Another promising photo sharing startup, Snapchat has taken the social media platform by storm as the 5-year-old company is valued at $16 billion and features at #5 in Fortune’s “unicorn” list. However, the startup 100 million daily users. The company recorded a massive 8 billion video views per day giving hiccups to Instagram and Facebook.
The worst hit in the competition is Twitter as major executives are departing and the company is dealing with losses at the present time. Its monthly active user base hasn’t registered any growth in the last one year, stagnated at around 320 million monthly active users.
