The dramatic growth of Instagram – reaches 5 billion twice as fast as Flickr

In just a little more than two years, Instagram has gone from zero to 5 billion shared photos. The popular photo sharing app announced yesterday that it had surpassed 80 million users and 5 billion photos uploaded by its users. As a comparison, it took Flickr 4 years and 7 months to reach 5 billion photos. Instagram has reached that milestone in less than half that time.

Growth in recent months has been fuelled by the release of an Android app, which went live in April 2012.

“The combination of Android and network effects as more people use Instagram mean that we’re able to grow faster now more than ever,” Instagram creator Kevin Systrom told VentureBeat in July.

To illustrate just how fast Instagram has been growing, I made the graph below based on photo ID numbers (up to 550m, when Instagram changed how photos were identified) and official statements (4bn and 5bn).

If you want a graph with the individual data points, click here instead.

Here are the sources for each of the data points in the graph.

For a similar graph of Flickr’s growth from zero to 5 billion photos, see this blog post.

Note: I am @kullin on Instagram if you’d like to follow me.

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5 thoughts on “The dramatic growth of Instagram – reaches 5 billion twice as fast as Flickr”

It’s just amazing how fast has the Instagram social network spread across the globe, surpassing Flickr twice as fast. I wonder, how that will be boosted with Facebook acquiring Instagram. With such a social networking giant behind its back, the opportunities are almost infinite.

Flicr is for professionals, Instagram is mainly for tha amatours I think.

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5 thoughts on “The dramatic growth of Instagram – reaches 5 billion twice as fast as Flickr”