By: Nick Gambino
Well, they’ve finally done it – Instagram has crossed 3 billion monthly active users. The milestone achievement was announced by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. He made the announcement in a Threads post.
“Fun milestone for anyone keeping count: Instagram now has 3 billion monthly actives,” Zuckerberg exclaimed in the post accompanied by a Breaking Bad meme declaring “Billions with a B.”
It was further confirmed by Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri in a couple of posts on the platform.
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Instagram hit 2 billion not that long ago in 2022 showing their rapid and continued growth despite being an OG in the game. A large part of that is due to the smart addition of Reels to the platform.
When they added that feature back in 2020 it was a response to the sudden explosion in popularity of TikTok. Google also jumped on this short-form video bandwagon with YouTube Shorts. This was a crucial move at the time because TikTok was a major competitor threatening to MySpace social platforms like Instagram, Facebook and everyone else who didn’t see it coming.
Reels allowed Meta to stay in the game and not only that, they’ve stayed well ahead of TikTok. The latter platform currently boasts 1 billion monthly active users which is super impressive but only a third of Instagram’s. The only other platforms putting up numbers like that are Facebook and WhatsApp which are both owned by Meta.
While we live in a world where Instagram is a dominant force, this wasn’t a guarantee when Meta (then Facebook) bought the social app. In 2012, Zuckerberg and friends saw the future of social media and it was Instagram. Even though they only had 30 million monthly active users, the platform UI was clean and users were flocking to it in droves.
Fast forward to today and Instagram accounts for half of Meta’s annual revenue and has grown from what now looks like a poultry 30 million to over 3 billion.
