Instagram just announced that it now has 700 million users, which represents a pretty impressive growth spurt from the 600 million it announced just four months ago.
For additional context, Instagram announced 500 million users last June, meaning it took five months to hit its next major milestone in December. And before that, it took the company nine months to grow from the 400 million users it revealed in September 2015.
Instagram said in a blog post:
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.
Instagram had a mere 30 million users when Facebook acquired the photo-sharing service for a cool $1 billion in 2012. And at its current growth rate, it could well hit the one billion user mark within the next 12 months. This would put Instagram in a fairly elite club alongside other Facebook properties like WhatsApp, which passed one billion monthly users last February; Messenger, which followed suit just a few months later; and Facebook itself, which passed the magic billion user milestone some time ago.
by PAUL SAWERS
