Instagram would have reached i two billion monthly active users, thus entering the club of the “big four” of social networks to count so many accounts along with Facebook, WhatsApp and Youtube. Three out of four, as evident, are controlled by the Meta holding. “He would”, he said to himself, because there was no official announcement, a sign of how times have changed. Years ago, and still now for many brands or platforms, such a milestone would just be a success to celebrate. Yet in Menlo Park they chose a low profile approach: the figure comes in fact from an anonymous employee informed about the actual data of the application who spoke with the cnbc. The platform controlled by Meta has not confirmed, and probably will not.
First of all because Meta, formerly of Facebook, for some time no longer communicates the specific numbers of users for each product in its portfolio, preferring to communicate the overall audience reached by Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger. The last time specific numbers were released dates back to 2018, when the platform today led by Adam Mosseri and at the time by the co-founder Kevin Systrom announced the goal of one billion users. Breaking the news of cnbc for all likelihood, it would take three years to gain another billion users. More specifically, it would have taken place in mid-October, a few days before the announcement of the rebranding and change of Facebook strategy by Mark Zuckerberg.
Why Instagram doesn’t celebrate publicly
The fact is that at this moment Instagram is perhaps not too interested in celebrating this kind of milestone, which is also essential for business. From internal studies never reported on effects of social media for children and adolescents, subjected to the barrage of Congress even recently with the hearing of Mosseri in the Senate, up to the many tools launched in a hurry to try to limit the damage (such as “take a break“Last month to pause the app or the arrival of new parental controls), perhaps it is not worth underlining the weight and pervasiveness of what, WhatsApp excluded, is now the flagship product of the ecosystem by Zuck. Nonetheless, there is actually a lot to celebrate: TikTok still lags far behind. The platform most loved by teenagers hit its first billion users just this year. Italy is one of the reference and fastest growing countries and, not surprisingly, the Italian branch celebrated its most recent successes with an event in Milan called “duemilaventUnico” together with some of the best-known Italian creators such as Khaby Lame, first in Europe.
The numbers (and times) of social networks in the world and in Italy
Some number on the challenge: in terms of global downloads, second Sensor Tower the TikTok app has been downloaded 596.1 million times, this year, against Instagram’s 570.7 million. As for the US market, Forrester explains that 63% of 12-17 year olds use TikTok every week versus 57% of Instagram. In Italy the users of the first social network would be about 5.4 million, Instagram would have over 25 million. Axios instead, it calculated the time taken by the four platforms that exceeded two billion users to reach that milestone: Facebook took 13.3 years, YouTube 14.2, WhatsApp 11 and Instagram 11.2, starting from 2010.
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