Instagram has announced a milestone of more than 400 million users on its platform. The announcement was made by an official blog post that said, “While milestones like this are important, what really excites us is the way that visual communication makes the world feel a little bit smaller to every one of us.” The post also states that more than 75% users of Instagram reside outside the U.S.
The company had announced the 300 million users mark in December 2014. The latest growth rate shows over 100 million new users added in less than one year. Among them, more than 50% are from Asia and Europe. The post said that Brazil, Japan, and Indonesia are the leading contributors to its userbase. Additionally, more than 80 million photos are being shared on Instagram on daily basis. Instagram has announced various new features to the app in recent times. Last month, the app was updated to v7.5, with support for adding landscape and portrait photographs and videos. Earlier, the app used to support only media files with a square aspect ratio.
Apart from this, Instagram changed its advertising policy by increasing the earlier time limit of ads from 15 seconds to 30 seconds. The company also opened its advertising platform for wider range of businesses and in 30 new countries, including India. With rapid growth of Instagram's user strength, its advertisement revenues have also been forecasted for meteoric escalation. According to a report from eMarketer, Instagram will earn $595 million revenue this year, via mobile ads from around the world. The report further states that the advertisement revenue will reach $2.81 billion by 2017, and will account for about 10% of parent company Facebook’s global advertisement revenues. Instagram is expected to surpass both Google and Twitter's ad revernues in 2017, in terms of gross mobile display ads in the United States. The photo sharing app was acquired by Facebook in 2012 for $1 billion, in a business merger that now seems like a brilliant deal for Facebook.