Dive Brief:
- Instagram has reached 500 million total users, according to a blog post from the company. 300 million of those users are active daily.
- The social media platform reached the milestone in under six years, a year less than it took parent company Facebook.
- Instagram’s user base now comes 80% from outside the U.S., a figure that's up from 75% last year, with that growth led by the app's popularity in Japan, Germany, France and Indonesia, according to Business Insider.
Dive Insight:
The new numbers show where Instagram is in the race for users: While embattled Twitter boasts less than 140 million daily active users, fast-growing Snapchat recently achieved 150 million daily users. Those numbers pale in comparison to Instagram's 300 million daily users but especially Facebook's 1.09 billion daily active users.
Instagram said its user spend an average of 21 minutes a day on the platform. But amid the good news around its growing user base, recent research by SimilarWeb found Android users are spending less time on social media apps — with Instagram facing the biggest drop, nearly 24%, in time spent over the last year. Twitter also saw a similar decline in time spent with a roughly 23% drop, while Snapchat and Facebook saw less severe declines, 16% and 8%, respectively.
As Instagram’s user base continues to grow, it is also becoming more like Facebook as a marketing and advertising experience. Recently, it started allowing business accounts for the first time with targeting, measurement and reporting tools that aren’t available to individual users. Other changes include implementing an algorithm to users’ timelines, sharing an advertising platform with Facebook, and getting ad formats (like carousel ads) that debuted on Facebook previously.