International Shia News Agency

Instagram reaches more than 300 million users

SHAFAQNA – Instagram now has more than 300 million monthly active users worldwide — a 50 percent increase in the last nine months — which makes it bigger than Twitter.

The growth in user base will be key to attracting more advertisers to the photo-sharing platform. Instagram recently introduced video ads and also sells sponsored photo posts.

“With 300 million monthly users, Instagram’s audience is becoming very attractive to marketers, especially brand advertisers, and its rapid growth will only make it more appealing,” Debra Aho Williamson, a principal analyst with research firm eMarketer, said in a statement.

Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, said it had made efforts to eliminate spam and fake accounts and will start verifying accounts of celebrities, brands and athletes.

“As Instagram gets bigger, we’re focused on helping you discover photos and videos from people who you care about, whether it’s a friend or your favorite musician,” wrote Instagram’s CEO Kevin Systrom in a blog post that announced the user figures.He also said that users share more than 70 million photos and videos a day.

For now, Systrom isn’t interested in having the service produce its own content like YouTube or Netflix, according to the Wall Street Journal. “I believe we’re much more of a mediator. When we see content in the world that is interesting, we feature it on our blog. We feature it in our Instagram account,” Systrom told the newspaper.

Instagram and Facebook have been seeing strong user figures lately. Facebook, with 1.3 billion users worldwide, leads social media by attracting 66 percent of its monthly visitors in the U.S. to its service daily, according to a survey released this week by stock research firm UBS.

Instagram is second with 43 percent, and Twitter is third at 40 percent.

The data are the latest to show that, while Facebook might be losing favor among some teenagers, the company’s ownership of Instagram and messaging service WhatsApp are helping keep them in the family. About 60 percent of Instagram’s teen users identified themselves as daily users, just ahead of Facebook, Snapchat and Twitter.

Teenagers said they spent considerably more time on Snapchat, Instagram and Pinterest this year compared with last year, according to the survey. Twitter, followed by Facebook, received only slightly more attention.

UBS also surveyed Facebook users about what they thought about ads on the network, concluding that Facebook has room to generate even more consumer purchases than it already does if it continues to improve on who sees which ads.

source : http://www.sfgate.com/.

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