Meta's Active User Data Gap: Instagram's Individual Numbers Remain a Mystery

Meta has shared update about its number of users but it is not clear how many users each Meta app has individually. We already know that 3.065 billion people log in to Facebook every month but monthly users for Instagram are not known. 2022 was the last year when there was an update about Instagram's monthly users. According to that update, Instagram had 2 billion daily users and the number must have grown a lot in the last 2 years. We already know that Facebook has seen a decline in its daily users.

But last week, Meta had to show Instagram’s revenue figures because of Meta’s legal filing to FTC’s antitrust lawsuit. The lawsuit was asking Meta to sell WhatsApp and Instagram and Meta wanted to dismiss the lawsuit. The document that Meta showed to the court highlighted Instagram’s revenue. $11.3 billion were earned by Instagram in ad revenue in 2018 and $17.9 billion in 2019. It earned $22 billion and $32.4 billion revenue in 2020 and 2021 respectively. In the first half of 2022, Instagram earned $16.5 billion and earned more than $33 billion at the end of the same year.

30% of the total Meta's revenue was earned by Instagram in 2022, according to a report by Bloomberg. This suggests $40 billion of Meta's revenue was earned by Instagram in 2022. New app regulations by E.U also asks Meta to show its user count every six months. So according to the numbers given by Meta to E.U, there are 259 million monthly active users on Instagram in September 2023. Based on this, the US has approximately 175 million users and Asia has 750 million users, with India being Instagram’s biggest market. All these numbers total up to Instagram having about 2 billion users worldwide. These are not official numbers, but they provide an estimation based on the number of users Instagram has.

Image: DIW-AIgen

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by Arooj Ahmed via Digital Information World