While speaking at an advertising week event in New York on Monday, Facebook's head of global marketing solutions, Carolyn Evanson, said that Instagram now has 800 million active users. This is up from 700 million in April. According to TechCrunch, Carolyn also said that Instagram now has 500 million Daily Active Users. Instagram daily and monthly active user numbers show that it is way ahead of rival Snapchat, which in August announced that it has 173 million daily active users.
Facebook also announced that users are spending 80 percent more time watching videos on Instagram than they were a year ago, while video production by users has increased by four times. According to Instagram's blog post portal, there are two million monthly advertisers on Instagram, up from one million in March this year.
Instagram user number growth timeline and demography
December 2010 - 1 million
September 2011 - 10 million
July 2012 - 80 million
September 2013 - 150 million
December 2014 - 300 million
September 2015 - 400 million
December 2016 - 600 million
September 2017 - 800 million
According to Omnicore agency, 68 percent of Instagram users were female as of August, while 77.6 million users are from the United States.
The agency also reported that 59 percent of Instagram users are between the ages of 18 and 29, while 33 percent are between the ages of 30 and 49.
A brief history of Instagram
Instagram is now six years old and is available in 33 languages. Facebook acquired it for one billion in cash and stocks. According to TechCrunch, Instagrams first iOS app was introduced in October 2010, while its first Windows app was introduced in October 2013. An app for Windows computers and tablets was released in October 2016. As of April 2017, 80 percent of Instagram users were located outside the U.S. Instagram was purely a photo sharing service till June 2013, when 15-second video sharing was incorporated. Video lengths were increased from 15 seconds to 60 seconds in March 2016.
10 minutes of video can now be shared as from February of this year. Other functions that allowed Instagram to increase its number of users is the introduction of the live video feature. Such features were only available on websites such as Facebook and YouTube.
Advertising on Instagram was introduced in November 2013 according to The Verge. Advertisers on its platform reached 200,000 in February 2016 to one million in March 2017. Advertiser numbers currently stand at two million.