New Delhi: Within just nine months of hitting 200 million users, photo-sharing app Instagram has hit another milestone as the company says it now has 300 million monthly active users, sharing more than 70 million photos every day, and an average of 2.5 billion daily "likes." More than 70 percent of its users are outside the U.S.
This makes Instagram more popular than Twitter, which had 284 million monthly active users.
"We're seeing a lot of people coming in the fashion world, a lot of people coming in, in the youthful teens world, and a lot of people internationally as well," CEO Kevin Systrom said in an interview.
"We're thrilled to watch this community thrive and witness the amazing connections people make over shared passions and journeys," CEO Kevin Systrom said in a blog entry.
Systrom also says that Instagram is also going to begin verifying the Instagram accounts of celebrities, athletes and brands -- just as Twitter does.
Instagram is also weeding out spam accounts, deleting them from the network instead of deactivating them.
In July, Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg told analysts that “globally, people using Instagram now spend around 21 minutes a day on average using the app.”
Instagram was launched for iPhone in October 2010, before being ported to Android in April 2012. It reached 100 million active users in February 2013, then 200 million in March 2014. The recent feat happened in just nine months. Facebook, which itself has a whopping 1.35 billion users, bought Instagram in 2012.
Brands and celebrities alike use Instagram as a popular social media channel. On the brands front, Instagram has been trying to make money by selling advertising, putting its first ads in users' feeds in late 2013 in the US.
With 300 million people using the app, Instagram remains focused on growth, with its parent company seemingly keen to avoid being too over-aggressive in its efforts to make money.
