Instagram registers 700 million users!

Instagram just won’t stop! Within just four months of announcing a record 600 million users on their platform, Instagram crossed 700 million users yesterday registering their fastest ever growth since the company’s inception.

In December last year, Instagram celebrated 600 million users, up from 500 million in June that year, which is roughly six months, and the newest 100 million users arriving in just four months time shows that not only is Instagram growing to be an absolute giant, it is growing faster than its competitors and even its parent company, Facebook.

We’re thrilled to announce that our community has grown to more than 700 million Instagrammers. And the last 100 million of you joined faster than ever. We’ve made it even easier for people across the globe to join the Instagram community, share their experiences and strengthen connections to their friends and passions. With new features like stories, live video and disappearing messages in Direct, people now have more ways than ever to express themselves and feel closer to what matters to them. From all of us at Instagram, thank you! Photo by @heysp

A post shared by Instagram (@instagram) on Apr 26, 2017 at 6:04am PDT

Soon, the platform may join parent and siblings WhatsApp and Messenger in the billion user club, whereas Snapchat has remarkably held its ground, but that does not appear to be enough. Attracting newer users has proved troublesome for Snapchat, even as their Stories clone continues to grow significantly.

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Here’s a timeline of Instagram’s growth, and the amount of time the platform took to add each of their 100 million users:

October 6, 2010 – Launch

February 26, 2013 – 100 million; 28 months

March 25, 2014 – 200 million; 13 months

December 10, 2014 – 300 million; 9 months

September 22, 2015 – 400 million; 9 months

June 21, 2016 – 500 million; 9 months

December 15, 2016 – 600 million; 6 months

April 26, 2017 – 700 million; 4 months

Instagram Stories has had a huge part to play in Instagram’s rapid growth, registering 200 million DAUs within a year of introduction, and as per Josh Constine from TechCrunch, an Instagram spokesperson replied in the affirmative when asked if Instagram Stories has helped the photosharing platform attract newer users, “Yes, it’s impacted growth and retention.”

Instagram also recently combined disappearing messages into Instagram Direct, which made it more like Snapchat, but by now, no one really bothers to point that out, neither does it amuse anyone. Well, Instagram Direct just breached the 375 million user mark which indicates just how well things are going for Instagram.

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Meanwhile, permanent rival in the ephemeral space, Snapchat is languishing behind with just 161 million DAUs, which is much less and slower than their rivals growth.

If those problems were not enough, Snapchat lost a chunk of their Indian user base this month after Evan Spiegel’s alleged comments about not wanting to expand their business in India since it was a poor country went viral, and irate Indian social media users went on to uninstall Snapchat and hijacked the app’s ratings on the iOS and Android app stores.

Furthermore, users who had never installed Snapchat proceeded to install the app, rate it ‘one star’ and uninstalled the app, and this went on for a couple of days until the entire fiasco blew over.

Instagram is closer to a billion than it is to their closest rivals, Pinterest and Snapchat, and if that does not put things into perspective regarding Instagram’s success, we do not know what will.

Meanwhile, the phenomenal user numbers have translated into revenue for the company, registering 1 million advertisers on their platform, adding 500k advertisers within six months time. Not only that, Instagram also boasts of 8 million business profiles with 80% of Instagram users connected to at least one business.

The blog post that announced the news ends with an expression of gratitude, “From all of us at Instagram, thank you!”