Photo and video sharing app, Instagram, is celebrating reaching the 500 million user mark, confirming it as one of the most popular and fastest growing social networks in history.
In an announcement made by the company last week, the popular service has grown by more than 25% since September 2015, when the app hit the 400 million user mark. This means that Instagram is welcoming an average of 10 million new users worldwide each month. The rate of growth for the photo sharing platform is currently greater than its social media rivals Facebook and Twitter.
As part of last week’s announcement, Instagram bosses also revealed that around 300 million people use the service on a daily basis, and the app sees over 95 million photos and videos shared each day. The company has also stated that more than 80% of its half a billion users live outside of the United States, the country of origin for Instagram. Of this 500 million users, 14 million of them are based in the UK.
Instagram is owned by social networking phenomenon, Facebook, who acquired the photo sharing service back in 2012 for $1 billion (£660 million) when it had accrued only 30 million users. Back then, many thought that Facebook was overpaying and were unconvinced of the site’s worth. However, with the rate of growth Instagram is enjoying, the figure appears to have now been justified.
The app is mainly used to share photographs and users have become accustomed to its iconic filters to make their photos more appealing to other users of the site. To complement these filters, the company released a standalone app, Layout, to allow users to combine a number of photos to create a collage to post on the site.
As video is becoming a popular entity on the site, a further two standalone apps were introduced to improve the user experience – Hyperlapse and Boomerang. These apps allow users to edit video speeds, amongst other aspects, before being posted to the main site. Instagram is also seeing an increase in video advertising on the site, as this is a growing market within the UK, so is likely to be a part of Instagram’s marketing plans in an attempt to find its niche.
Instagram is continuously changing to try to and keep up to date with some of the larger social networks, such as Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat. In an attempt to modernise the look of the site, it changed its logo to a more colourful, vibrant and modernised style last month.
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RT @EngageWeb: Instagram reaches 500 million milestone: https://t.co/QPQvKaT6bM
RT @EngageWeb: Instagram reaches 500 million milestone: https://t.co/QPQvKaT6bM
[…] June 2016, Instagram managed to reach the 500 million user mark less than 12 months after reaching 400 million. This was not long after the company updated its logo […]