By: Nick Gambino
Instagram is on a roll racking up 100 million additional monthly active users in the last 4 months alone. With that huge upsurge in monthly users, Instagram is now at 700 million active users each month.
This is big news for the Facebook-owned company if you compare these numbers against what it took to achieve each 100 million-user milestone before it. The growth rate is quite staggering.
Instagram hit its first 100 million users 28 months after initial launch. They hit 200 million 13 months after that followed by 300 million 9 months later, the next was 9 months after that, then 9 months, 6 months and now 4 months. That’s a sure sign of a large tech snowball showing no signs of slowing.
The recent numbers are due in large part to added features on the social media platform. Specifically, they added Stories which was a “rip-off” of sorts from Snapchat as well as disappearing messages. We could write these off and say they’re not particularly popular features but when you look at the slowed growth rate over at Snapchat you can see the impact.
Besides new user features, Instagram has worked to make it easier to become a user and connect with friends from Facebook. “Growth was driven by a number of factors, including our ability to better connect people with their friends on Instagram,” an Instagram spokesperson told TechCrunch. “We also took steps to simplify and improve our sign-up process, which helped bring in new people from all over the world.”
And let’s not discount the importance of users in other countries. Currently, 80% of Instagram users hail from outside the U.S. with the most popular ones being Brazil, U.K., Japan, India, Indonesia and Turkey.
If the social media giant continues at this rate they’ll hit 1 billion users in the next 12 months. That will allow them to join the “Social Media Billion Users Club” whose members include Facebook, Messenger and WhatsApp which coincidentally are all Facebook.
Do you think Instagram will sustain this growth rate or is it destined to cool off in the next few months? We want to hear your thoughts. Comment down below!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nick Gambino is a regular script writer and tech beat reporter for NewsWatch. He lives in Northern Virginia with his wife and daughter.
