Instagram announced Tuesday that it has surpassed half a billion active users.
Instagram is an mobile photo-sharing, video-sharing, and social networking service that lets its users to take pictures and videos, and share them either publicly or privately on the app, as well as through a variety of other social networking platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Flickr.
Instagram was made by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, and started in October 2010 as a free mobile app. The service quickly gained popularity, with over 100 million active users as of April 2012 and over 300 million as of December 2014. 25,000 people downloaded the app on its first day.
The service was bought by Facebook in April 2012 for approximately US$1 billion in cash and stock.In 2013, Instagram increased by 23%, while Facebook, as the parent company, only increased by 3%.
Eighty percent of Instagram users are non US and 60 percent (about 300 million) log onto the picture-sharing app daily. By comparison, Instagram competitor Snapchat approximately have 100 million users.
Instagram's user base is still very small in size compared to parent company Facebook, which has 1.65 billion monthly active users.
“500 million is a milestone very few companies get to,” Systrom said in an interview with FORBES at the company’s Menlo Park, Calif. headquarters. “This scale is not a badge on our uniform, but a signal of our ambition. If we can have a billion or a billion and a half on Instagram, we get closer to capturing every experience in the world.”
