Instagram Hits 500 Million Monthly Active Users

[Umair Malik]

Facebook’s latest achievement comes from the photograph-sharing platform Instagram, which can finally boast 500 million monthly active users.

Just so you can boast that to a Twitter friend of yours, yes, Instagram is now much larger than Twitter, which has 320 million of monthly users. The growth of Instagram has been phenomenal in its own right, though, as the network reached 400 million monthly users just last September, and has more than doubled in size the last two years alone.

In yet another important stat, the social network also has 300 million daily active users. Compared to the rival which is considered its nemesis, Snapchat, Instagram is now twice as big. More than 80 percent of the activity comes from outside the US.

It is also seeing 95 million photo uploads every single day, with an average user spending 21 minutes on the app each day. One concern for the network would be keeping the rate of photo uploads up, which has consistently slowed, from 70 million a day to 80 million, and then finally to 95 million as it raked in 100 million monthly users each time.

Instagram is also a lucrative platform for advertisement too, having from just a few hundred advertisers to 200,000 marketers in 200 countries worldwide.

According to Instagram founder Kevin Systrom, the appeal of Instagram is in the very DNA of the company’s philosophy itself. Calling images a “universal language” in a Forbes interview, he acknowledges that the growth of internet access and mobile devices invariably helped his company.

Instagram was first released in October, 2010 as a free app on the iOS, registering 10 million users in less than a year, before making an appearance on Android only in April, 2012.

That same month, it was announced that the service would be brought by Facebook for an incredible $1 billion and the rest is history.

Looking at all of that now, it appears that Facebook got the deal of the century.

@Propakistani