Take this with a grain of salt:
Back in late December of last year, we noted a huge milestone for photo-sharing app Instagram: a million users. As we noted at the time, remarkably, it took them only three months to hit the mark. That’s crazy when you consider it took Foursquare a full year to hit that mark. And it took Twitter two years! Well now Instagram’s insane growth has also been made to look small: by Instagram.
The service has just hit 2 million users. They tweeted the milestone earlier, and I’ve confirmed it with the company. This comes just six weeks after the million mark milestone.
Instagram’s size leading up to the important SXSW conference (which starts in a few weeks) has to intimidate rivals. But their rate of growth is now even more intimidating. And it’s crazy when you consider that they’re still iOS-only. And when I say that, you might think I mean they don’t have an Android app or a BlackBerry app, etc. And that’s all true. But they don’t even have a web presence that you can sign up at!
I watched Twitter explode in real time. I'm one of the "older" users of Twitter (but by no means an original Twitter user). It went up in numbers so quickly because of two factors: one, the Spammers, and two, the confused and inarticulate who created accounts and abandoned them. Spam has hit Posterous, but not so much Tumblr, and that's a good thing. One of the next big moves that professional Spammers will make is towards photo Spam, where they'll blast out marketing images in order to get people to look at ads. I could be wrong on that, but oh well.
The numbers given for the "size" of these services should be adjusted to reflect the number of Spammers. As always, good luck getting anyone to throw cold water over their own marketing hype.
0 comments:
Post a Comment