Towards the end of 2014, Instagram announced that it had more than 300 million people who use the platform actively. The company now has seen an additional 100 million users sign up for Instagram to now an impressive 400 MAUs (monthly active users)
This is an impressive milestone for the 5 year old company that is now bigger than Twitter in the number of active users. The company pointed out that that 75% of its users are from countries outside the US and in particular the last 100 million users that were added in the past 9 months, more than half come from Europe and Asia; specifically Indonesia, Japan and Brazil.
During this past year, historic moments were immortalized on Instagram as well as significant changes to its experience in both the mobile apps and the web apps. NASA uploaded photos of Pluto on Instagram which were taken by their New Horizons spacecraft. They also updated their mobile apps with a new interface for the Explorer tab, added support for more pixel dense images, landscape photo support and improved Instagram Direct. On desktop, they revamped it by giving it an updated interface and later on adding a search button.
The social network has a huge potential when it comes to revenue generated by ads and the company has been making strides in attaining this goal. Recently, they launched ads for all businesses worldwide which include 30 second ads. It was earlier reported that Instagram wouldgenerate more ad revenue than Twitter in the US and from the fact that they have 400 million users with the highest rate of engagement among other social networks, it may turn out to become a significant revenue stream for its parent company, Facebook.
