The photo-sharing and video-sharing app has gained more than 600 million monthly active users. Instagram made the announcement on its blog on Wednesday. They also revealed that 100 million of the total active users joined in just the past six months.
Snapchat-like Feature To Thank For Growth?
Instagram has doubled its monthly users from 300 million to 600 million in just two years. The Facebook-owned app saw its rapid growth after introducing "Instagram Stories," a feature that allows users to post photos and videos that would fleetingly disappear in 24 hours. The feature was deemed a success with a reported 100 million views each day.
The app has been taking a few notes from successful competitors as it looks to alter its appearance into a full-on social media sharing platform. Just last week, Instagram launched its live video broadcast feature that functions similarly with Facebook Live and Twitter's Periscope. The major difference is that these videos can't be saved and will disappear the moment you are done broadcasting.
In an interview with Variety, Instagram product head Kevin Weil acknowledged that these features aren't exactly novel ideas. He revealed that "some good ideas are good ideas," before adding that "it's a feature that makes sense to people."
Aside from those features, Instagram has also been working hard in the past six months to strike the abuse on the platform. It gave the users the power to delete unwanted followers and filter out abusive words.
Instagram Gives Promising Figures
According to Forbes, Instagram was first released in 2010 and was later acquired by Facebook in 2012 for around $1 billion. The company is concentrating on increasing its global advertising business this year and allowing more real-time sharing.
In September, the app reached 500,000 advertisers after advertising was first launched widely a year ago. Instagram is expected to bring about $1.5 billion in mobile advertising sales and $5 billion in 2018.