On Wednesday, the photo-sharing service Instagram announced that it now has 700 million users. Instagram reached 600 million users in December 2016 and took just four month to add 100 million new users.
“We’re thrilled to announce that our community has grown to more than 700 million Instagrammers. And the last 100 million of you joined faster than ever,” the company wrote in a blog post.
“We’ve made it even easier for people across the globe to join the Instagram community, share their experiences and strengthen connections to their friends and passions. With new features like stories, live video and disappearing messages in Direct, people now have more ways than ever to express themselves and feel closer to what matters to them. From all of us at Instagram, thank you!”
Instagram had 500 million users in June last year, and took about 6 months to reach another 100 million users in December.
Instagram came into existence in 2010. It allows users to take pictures and share them either publicly or privately on the app, as well as through several other social networking platforms. Instagram was created by Mike Krieger and Kevin Systrom as a free mobile app in 2010. The app quickly became popular among internet users, and was able to create an active user base of over 100 million by April 2012. In 2012, Facebook bought it for about US$1 billion in cash and stock. Since then, the app has grown exponentially, due to ease of sharing images. In 2013, Instagram grew by 23%, while Facebook grew only by 3%. In the past two years, Instagram’s user base has more than doubled. It reached 400 million monthly active users in September 2015, and since then it had added another 100 million monthly active users by June 2016.
In this January this year, Instagram revealed its plan to add advertising features in Instagram stories to boost advertising revenues. At that time, the new ad features was being tested with major advertisers such as Nike, GM, and Airbnb. The new feature allowed users to see full-screen ads in intervals while swiping through photos and videos on their Instagram Stories dash.
“Instagram could end up being as strong a revenue component for Facebook as YouTube has been for Google,” Noah Mallin, head of social for ad agency MEC Wavemaker, said at that time.
You must be logged in to post a comment.