Instagram Passes 3 Billion Monthly Users, Credits Push Toward Reels
Photographers may mourn Instagram’s move from a photo-first platform to one dominated by Reels, but the strategy seems to be working for Meta.
Bloomberg is reporting today that Instagram recently reached the mind-boggling number of three billion monthly users, making it the leading Meta platform.
Instagram head Adam Mosseri says that it will continue to move away from the still image and is even experimenting with showing users the Reels tab when they first open the app instead of the traditional feed. The kind of life-sharing photos that Instagram initially became known for has been declining for years, Mosseri says.
Instagram has moved to a place where people send each other Reels via Direct Messages, keeping conversations and interests to a specific person. Users now spend half of their time on the app watching videos, most of which are made by people they don’t know and by accounts they don’t even follow.
“People think of us — they think of a feed of square photos, but that’s just not how people use Instagram and hasn’t been for a long time now,” Mosseri tells Bloomberg.
The Rise of TikTok
Instagram’s diversion into video was directly to do with the rise of TikTok, which has always been a video-centric app, despite its recent policy of encouraging users to share more photos.
Mosseri says that TikTok is “top of mind” and, along with his boss Mark Zuckerberg, the pair fret that Instagram could shrink or lose its cultural relevance. Facebook has also danced around the three billion mark, but has bled monthly active users and nowadays it skews towards an older audience.
“The most likely outcome for a large platform like ours is that we shrink eventually. Or maybe we grow, but we become less culturally relevant,” Mosseri tells Bloomberg. “It’s not just about the metrics. It’s about – does culture break on Instagram? Do interesting things happen on Instagram? Are we part of the zeitgeist?”
Starting in October, Instagram will run tests in India and South Korea that will see the app open to the Reels feed by default. TikTok is currently banned in India, so Mosseri sees it as an opportunity to grow in the world’s most populous country.
Image credits: Header photo licensed via Depositphotos.
