Instagram has seen a massive drop in daily active users. It had topped up at 16.4 million daily active users around two weeks ago but that number is down to 12.4 million daily users. According to AppData and Instagram has lost over 3.5 million users over the past 7 days as far as daily active users are concerned.
Instagram has seen amazing success in the past year or so. Its big moment was when Facebook shelled out a cool billion dollars to acquire it. Instagram was soon working closely with Facebook. Instagram on 17th December, updated its privacy policy. It basically gave itself the permission to use user photos for commercial usage.
That started a blacklash from users and it was not surprising that daily active users actually dropped by 24%. Instagram rolled back the new privacy policy update to stop the criticism but it has probably lost the ‘trust’ factor.
Why Instagram looks in trouble?
Instgram is not really a photo app as much as it is a social app. That means during Christmas week and holiday season over the past week, it should have seen record user activity. It ideally should have seen record user activity and not a drastic loss of active users.
Instagram has also actually become less social but turning off Twitter cards which allowed Twitter feeds to display photos in the stream itself without requiring people to visit the Instagram website. Twitter hit back with its own filters for photos. Facebook itself has sort of canibalized Instagram features in their own photo app for iOS. I won’t be surprised in thinking that the best days of Instagram are behind it.
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