The year 2021 is drawing to a close with a great success for Instagram: the social network has reached a new record of monthly active users, here's how many are
The social network audience is constantly growing, especially if you take into account those platforms that have the right features to literally keep their users glued to the display of their smartphones. One of these is undoubtedly Instagram that, just recently marked a new record.
The news of the goal in terms of monthly active users of Instagram was reported by the U.S. news channel CNBC. The communication, however, does not come directly from the company but from some employees of the company who have asked to remain anonymous because they are not authorized to make statements about it. This is a particularly significant success, which unequivocally highlights the involvement of many members who, daily, connect to the application to interact with content and publish photographs, video clips or make live broadcasts to share with their followers.
Instagram, what the numbers say
According to what has been confirmed by CNBC, Instagram has reached the threshold of two billion active users per month. The result would date back to last October, a period in which Facebook, Inc., the company that owns the social Facebook and Instagram, the latter starting in 2012 after a $1 billion acquisition, as well as the messaging program WhatsApp, was transformed into Meta while remaining under the command of its founder Mark Zuckerberg.
Only in 2018, the social had reached the remarkable figure of 1 billion monthly users, eight years after its creation. To repeat its personal record, however, it took much less time: three years, during which Instagram has carved out the role of one of the main players in the market, right alongside its colleague Facebook.
Instagram, an eventful year
It has not been an easy year for Instagram, especially in light of the wave of controversy related to the negative influence on the mental health of young people by social networks. Yet the social has managed to emerge despite the constant battle with other fierce competitors, one above all TikTok.
With the direct competitor that has made short videos its communication tool, competition is always high. This is shown by the data of a survey by Forrester, a market research company, published in November 2021: 63% of U.S. kids between 12 and 17 years old use the TikTok app weekly (which in 2021 reached 1 billion users), while only 57% of them make the same use of Instagram. The war of downloads also remains open: there are 570.7 million for the latter while it rises to over 596 million for the social born in China.