Instagram now counts more than half a billion monthly active users. It’s an important milestone for the photo sharing app, and one that puts Instagram among the elite social media and messaging apps alongside Facebook, WeChat and WhatsApp.
Instagram is actually growing faster than ever. Imagine that it has added over 100 million MAUs since September 2015!

Image credit: TechCrunch
The other good news for Instagram is that its growth is mostly coming from outside the U.S. with countries like Japan, Germany, France and Indonesia leading the way. The U.S. still counts for just over 100 million users, but that only represents 20% of the total user-base now.
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For Kevin Systrom, founder and CEO of Instagram, this is very important, but only a small step towards his goal of “capturing every experience in the world,” as he explains in a recent interview with FORBES.
[quote]500 million is a milestone very few companies get to. 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.[/quote]
300 Million Daily Active Users
This is maybe the most important for the platform: Instagram now counts 300 million daily active users. The platform has now become a true part of our lives, one we check daily, and in many cases, several times a day.
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Bigger Than Twitter… And Snapchat!
With these latest stats, Instagram is now definitively bigger than Twitter (320 MAUs) and at least twice as big as Snapchat – even taking into account the bold numbers Snapchat is claiming in order to get new advertisers (Snapchat still does not officially comment on its MAUs).
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Facebook has a big impact on the growth of Instagram, and the #1 social media platform will certainly keep on pushing it to grow. With so many users, it is now understandable why Instagram is pushing its advertising capabilities to more users, and moving away from a chronological timeline.
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