Instagram is touting the success of its recent stream of updates as an important factor in helping it snap up an additional 100 million users over the past six months. As a result, Facebook’s photo-sharing platform now has a total user base of 600 million.

That’s almost double the amount of users Twitter currently has (317 million). Although, Snapchat is a better comparison, considering the similar features the two now boast — especially since Instagram started cloning its younger rival’s sharing functions — the temporal messaging app has thus far only disclosed its daily active users, which at last count stood at 150 million. Instagram, on the other hand, boasts 300 million daily users. This time round, however, it did not disclose if those figures received a bump, instead focusing on its monthly active user base.

So, what’s behind the continuing interest in the photo-sharing app? According to Instagram: “a lot has changed this year … with more ways to share than ever before.” Chief among the social-sharing updates the company has released in 2016 was its infamous take on Snapchat’s Stories feature, allowing users to share slideshow-style collections of disappearing images and videos. The platform revealed in October that Stories had quickly amassed 100 million daily views. The figure sounds impressive, but comprised just one-fifth of Instagram’s total user base (now one-sixth) and one-third of its daily user base. Overall, it remains unclear if Stories (as a general sharing function) is versatile enough to make the jump to other platforms.

Instagram also brought temporal sharing to its direct messaging function. Most recently, Instagram took after its parent company and rolled out live video, it also borrowed from Pinterest by adding a photo bookmarking function. And that’s not to mention the comment control and safety tools it announced at the start of this month.

Finally, Instagram gave an indication of its future monetization prospects with a new shopping feature that allowed select companies to sell their products within its app.

With that kind of variety, it’s no wonder tens of millions of additional users are joining the app on a monthly basis. At this rate, it’s only a matter of time till it ends up joining Facebook’s other properties (such as WhatsApp, Messenger, and its flagship social network) in the billion user club.

Related Posts

WhatsApp has begun testing a long-overdue group chat feature

The Meta-owned messaging platform is testing a new feature called "group chat history sharing" (via a WABetaInfo report). As the name suggests, the feature lets a WhatsApp user (likely the admin) share the chat history (up to 100 messages sent within 14 days) with someone while adding them to a group.

You can now choose the kind of content you see on Instagram Reels

The announcement came from Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri, giving people a more direct way to shape the kind of videos they actually want to see. At its core, Your Algorithm lets users actively tune their Reels experience.

New UK under-5 screen time guidance targets passive time, what it changes for you

The push is rooted in government-commissioned research that links the highest screen use in two-year-olds, around five hours a day, with weaker vocabulary than peers closer to 44 minutes a day. Screens are already close to universal at age two, so the guidance is being framed as help you can actually use, not a ban.