Instagram hits 100 million active users per month

The beauty of a site like ours is that it is recording history, history that you can easily re-live by using the search function. Is there a particular phone that brings back memories for you? Type in the name and you can read all about the handset and what was happening in the industry at the time of its introduction. For example, if the Palm Pre brings back a flood of memories for you, you can check out the introduction of the phone at CES 2009 and take in all of the excitement that webOS seemed to offer. You can then read about the 50,000 to 100,000 units sold by Sprint on the weekend of its launch, breaking the carrier's previous sales record set by the Samsung Instinct (!) If you had the time, you could continue reading about poor sales, lack of apps, shoddy marketing until the device was overshadowed by the Motorola DROID. History in the making happens on this site every day.

What put our mind into Sherman's Wayback machine mode was the interesting story from Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom about the early days of the site that appears on the Instagram blog. At the end of his story, Systrom reports that the app now has 100 million active users a month, up 10 million from the 90 million reported 5 weeks ago. It is proof enough that the ToS debacle is clearly behind them with only some legal clean-up remaining.

If you use the search feature on phoneArena, you can find a story from December 22nd before the Android version launched, before Instagram was a household word. At the time, Instagram had hit 1 million users just three months after it was launched for the Apple iPhone. It wasn't until the Android version of the app was available that the whole thing started snowballing. Over 1 million Android users downloaded the site in less than 24 hours which became 10 million in 22 days. But even before that happened, Facebook bought Instagram for what turned out to be about $750 million in stock. And the growth continued.

The only question mark that follows Instagram is the musical question about how Facebook will justify its purchase of the site. Somehow, someway, it must be monetized because Facebook answers to a higher authority-it's stockholders. Besides, reaching 100 million people definitely has a value to other companies. Unlocking that value will be the key to Instagram's financial growth. Its subscriber growth already seems pretty certain.

source: Instagram via Engadget