Instagram reported a few usage stats today, marking the first time it has talked about numbers on its own site since the kerfuffle raised over its terms of service change following the Facebook buy-out. The internal stats show strong engagement, and user growth, rather than a decline in active Instagram members, as first reported by AllThingsD. Part of the discrepancy between the these numbers and third-party doom and gloom reports may have to do with the fact that Instagram is tracking monthly active users, of which it has 90 million, versus the less stable daily active users stat often cited by others.
Other stats listed by the mobile photo sharing app tackle the specific ways users engage with Instagram. 40 million photos are posted daily to the service, for instance, and its users manage to rack up 8,500 likes and 1,000 comments per second. That’s a strong indicator that whatever the reaction to Instagram’s proposed TOS changes, plenty of them are still interacting with the service at a breakneck pace. Mike Isaac at AllThingsD also points out that while the 90 million figure being reported today may look weak compared to the 100 million users it reported last September, these are specifically active accounts, where previously the company only shared data on straightforward registrations, which means total registered users is probably much higher at this point.
For perspective, Facebook itself has 37,037 combined Likes and comments per second, according to stats released by the company in August when you break down the daily average they reported at the time. Instagram’s 9,500 similar actions per second definitely trail, but are nonetheless impressive given that Instagram is mobile-only and a much younger service. Facebook also reported in October that it had crossed the 1 billion monthly active user mark (based on users who log into the service at least once a month), which means that its MAUs on average engage more with the service in terms of likes and comments than Instagram’s, but that’s also not very surprising given Instagram’s emphasis on passive enjoyment of a stream of images.
Instagram is reporting these just two days before its revised privacy and user policies go into effect, which are the result of the feedback it received after changing its terms the first time around.
Instagram is a free photo sharing application that allows users to take photos, apply a filter, and share it on the service or a variety of other social networking services, including Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Tumblr, Flickr, and Posterous. The application is compatible with any iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch running iOS 3.1.2 or above or any Android device running Android 2.2 or above. In an homage to both the Kodak Instamatic and Polaroid cameras, Instagram confines photos into a square...
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