Instagram Now Larger Than Twitter

Instagram announced on Tuesday that it has hit the 400 million user mark, just nine months after announcing it has 300 million users. The photo-centric social media platform was launched less than five years ago.

How did they do it? By going global:

“Our community has evolved to be even more global, with more than 75 percent living outside of the US. To all the new Instagrammers: welcome! Among the last 100 million to join, more than half live in Europe and Asia. The countries that added the most Instagrammers include Brazil, Japan and Indonesia.”

And by the way, those are 400 million monthly active users, according to Instagram’s press page, which means it has officially passed Twitter’s 316 million monthly active users as of its most recent earnings report. 

What it means for Instagram

Going global is likely the best thing for Instagram. With the market being saturated in the United States, there’s likely not much more room to grow. But since the app offers what people around the world already love (taking and sharing pictures), there’s nothing stopping it from continuing its meteoric rise.

Quite the journey for a company Facebook bought in 2012 for $1 billion. It had just 30 million users at the time. Instagram has also begun running ads on its platform, as it slowly rolls out its monetization process. Investors of Facebook shouldn’t worry too much about ads scaring off users. According to analysts at Kenshoo, a marketing software firm, users are two and a half times more likely to click on ads on Instagram than on any other social media platform. Not bad.

What it means for Twitter

It seems as if Twitter never figured out what it takes to gain users like Facebook and Instagram does. While hopes were high, evidenced by the company’s stock soaring above $70 per share within months of its IPO, it’s now at a more comfortable $27 per share.