Instagram, the popular photo-sharing application for smartphones that was acquired by Facebook earlier in 2012, has not suffered a drop in users in the aftermath of its mid-December announcement about changing its terms and privacy policy to allow user content and information to be repurposed for advertising efforts, contrary to recent reports.
Quite the opposite, in fact. As an Instagram spokesperson told The Verge on Friday: “We continue to see strong and steady growth in both registered and active users of Instagram.”
Instagram didn’t specify how many new users had joined in recent days, but in September, Facebook’s CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg said that Instagram had crossed 100 million registered users, up from 80 million reported in June.
The announcement of continued growth on Friday came on the same day that Instagram published on its blog a list of notable new individuals and corporate brands who signed-up and began using the app during 2012, including Oprah Winfrey, Kim Kardashian and Lebron James, among others.
Instagram’s announcements followed a story in The New York Post Friday morning citing a decline in Instagram’s daily-active users as measured by third-party app usage tracking service AppData, a division of the public company WebMediaBrands (which also owns the blogs All Facebook, Inside Facebook and Media Bistro, among others).
However, AppData’s own figures clearly state that they are just estimates, and are based primarily on users who log-in to other apps through Facebook’s Connect feature, which links those apps with users’ Facebook accounts. Instagram hasn’t released any figures on how many of its users elect to log into both services, but it is not a requirement to use Facebook to use Instagram, so AppData’s numbers may not account for a portion of Instagram users.
As Instagram’s spokesperson also told the Verge in regards to AppData’s Instagram user estimates: “This data is inaccurate.”
Instagram, which launched in October 2010, saw a meteoric rise in 2012, gaining massive numbers of users including other notables such as President Obama. Facebook announced in April it would be acquiring Instagram for a price then of $1 billion in cash and stock and completed the acquisition in September.
But Instagram suffered a vocal backlash from some notable users following its decision to revise its privacy policy and terms of service on December 17, to allow Instagram to take its user photos and data and repurpose them in advertising products, none of which have launched yet on the app.
Many users threatened to delete their accounts, posting photos of their farewell messages to Instagram itself for their followers to see. Instagram later backtracked and restored its original terms on advertising, which still allow the network to make use of user information in connection with advertising, and Instagram is still going ahead with other changes to commercialize the app.
