Instagram has confirmed at an Advertising Week event in New York that it has hit a new milestone, 800 million active users per month. Back in April, the Facebook-owned social media platform confirmed it had reached 700 million users, while engagement saw a significant boost thanks to its then-recently launched Stories feature. Now, just five months later, the company’s monthly user figure has grown a further 100 million, and the popularity of Stories is continuously increasing.
Of the now 800 million total monthly users, 500 million are active each day, representing a huge increase of 200 million since the launch of Instagram Stories just over a year ago. In terms of advertising clients, Instagram’s base has doubled since March, with its advertising base now sitting at over 2 million. Speaking of advertising, video plays a significant role on Instagram and, thanks in part to Instagram Stories, the amount of time spent watching video has increased more than 80 percent in comparison to a year ago. In addition to this, the number of videos being produced by users themselves has also seen a significant boost, to the point of increasing 4 fold over the past 12 months. Instagram’s recent focus on introducing new features, as well as improving the likes of Stories is clearly working positively, with the platforms growth rate continuing to grow. Currently, the social network is still quite a way from hitting the 1 billion user mark, but if current growth rates continue, the platform could hit the milestone in the second half of next year. Once there, Instagram would join WhatsApp, Messenger, and Facebook itself as the social media giant’s fourth platform to hit 1 billion users, therefore giving Facebook a wide platform offering for different advertisers across the globe.
The popularity of Instagram, more specifically its Stories feature, is also causing trouble for competitor Snapchat, which is more good news for Facebook. In the past year, Instagram has grown its user base by hundreds of millions. Snapchat, on the other hand, has grown its base by just 30 million, proving the strain caused by Facebook’s platforms. For now, Snapchat is still experiencing growth, albeit more limited than in recent years, but if it fails to evolve in a manner that can attract a new group of users, the platform’s positive growth may eventually reach negative numbers and it could risk losing a large number of users to Instagram.