Guess the new algorithm didn’t scare anyone off: According to Instagram, the photo-sharing app now sees more than 300 million daily users. That’s a lot of rise-filtered pictures of feet.
Maybe more important, the figure indicates Instagram is seeing more users than teen-darling Snapchat, which founder Evan Spiegel said back in February total “more than 100 million.”
While there is certainly some wiggle room given Snapchat’s somewhat-hazy figure, we’re willing to bet that Spiegel didn’t round down to the tune of 200 million people. (A Snapchat representative told Select All the 100 million figure remains the latest number that the company has publicly confirmed.)
If you’ve been reading the tech press (including Select All), it might come as a surprise that Instagram sees more users than Snapchat. Snapchat is hugely popular and now has more users than Twitter, in part because it’s riding a broader trend away from public-facing social networks, which suffer deeply from a phenomenon called “context collapse,” and toward more private and ephemeral sharing apps. But Instagram, though it’s public by default, tends more toward the limited-audience camp of social networks, thanks to its lack of in-app sharing tools. Plus, it’s a slightly older app with a slightly more intuitive user interface (it involves significantly less tapping and swiping and sliding to find your content).
And, well, it depends on how you’re measuring popularity, anyway. Instagram says the app sees more than 95 million photos and videos posted each day, while Snapchat’s daily users are watching more than 10 billion videos per day. (Keep in mind that Snapchat counts you as one video view even if you only watch for a millisecond.) Which means, even though Instagram has more people engaging with its app every day, it’s likely daily user activity is significantly higher on Snapchat. This makes sense: As any good teen will tell you, you should include as many short videos as possible in your snap story, while Instagram has a pretty strict unwritten “one photo a day” rule. (Maybe twice if you’re somewhere particularly cool, like inside an active volcano or at a One Direction concert.)
