Instagram hits 400 million monthly users, mostly outside US

The news comes just nine months after Instagram topped 300 million users.

Instagram’s growth, while impressive, will need to continue if it wants to catch up to the user base of Facebook. Users now share over 80 million photos and videos on the platform per day on an average, which get around 3.5 billion daily likes. Most of the Instagrammers are from countries like Brazil, Japan and Indonesia.

When the site launched close to five years ago, 400 million was a distant dream, read the blog.

Instagram is Facebook’s only other wholly-owned platform which carries advertising and it’s being received positively by potential clients, analysts said.

Some celebs have joined since the last major update at 300 million users, and a few of the most followed are David Beckham and Caitlyn Jenner.

Compare that to Twitter, which claimed 316 million monthly active users during its Q2 earnings. Two years later, as of April 2012, Instagram marked over 100 million active users.

This milestone helped Instagram overtake Twitter to become the second biggest social network, next only to its parent company, Facebook.

More than 75% of Instagram users live outside of the US and more than half in Europe and Asia. While the collosal deal seemed inordinately pricey at the time, it’s looking more and more like a bargain as Instagram looks to flex its advertising muscle.

The aim to expand advertisements has put the company head-to-head with Twitter, which is also pursuing an aggressive revenue-generation strategy. This includes the first surface image of the planet Pluto and support for photo formats like landscape, portrait, etc. Another great feature offered by Instagram is the newly introduced search and explore function.