At a recent all-hands meeting with employees, Kevin Systrom, a founder and
chief executive of Instagram, showed off one of his favorite charts: Days to
Reach the Next 100 Million Users.
“It’s the only graph in the company that we celebrate when it declines,” Mr.
Systrom said in an interview last week at Instagram’s headquarters in
Menlo Park, Calif.
Not long ago, the Facebook-owned photo-based social network grew at a
steady clip. Every nine months, without fail, Instagram added another 100
million users somewhere in the world. Then, last year, it began racking up
more new users every day. It grew to 600 million users from 500 million in
Doug Chay ka
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only six months.
On Wednesday, just four months after reaching that milestone, the company
announced it had reached another: About 700 million people now use
Instagram every month, with about 400 million of them checking in daily.
I had come to visit Mr. Systrom because I’m one of the new 100 million. I
technically joined Instagram years ago but used it only occasionally. In the
past few months, however, I began diving in more often, and now I check it
several times a day. As I used Instagram more, I realized something about
the photo-sharing app: It’s becoming Facebook’s next Facebook.
Part of what got me interested in using Instagram more was the war
between Facebook and Snapchat, the picture-messaging app that has
created genuinely new ways of communicating online — and whose features
Instagram and Facebook’s other subsidiaries recently copied.
Instagram’sfounders, Kevin Systrom, left, and Mike Krieger, at the company’s
headquartersin Menlo Park, Calif. Christie Hemm Klok for The New York Times
But once I started using Instagram, I discovered something surprising:
Instagram has improved on the features it took from Snapchat. Over much
of the past year it has added lots of other features, too. Among them are a
feed ranked by personalization algorithms rather than by chronology, live
streaming, the ability to post photo galleries and a (controversial) new app
design and logo.
Instagram is now substantially changing the daily experience of using the
service at a speed that would ordinarily feel reckless for a network of its size.
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But rather than alienating existing users, its confident moves seem to be
paying off.
This is difficult to quantify. My subjective experience may not match yours
(lots of people, for example, say they hate the new ranked feed). But for me,
Instagram’s many changes have made for a social network that feels more
useful, interesting and fun than it was last year. Part of it is the new features
themselves, but a bigger reason is the greater use that the features have
inspired. Networks are better when more people use them more often; the
more I’ve used Instagram recently, the more stuff I’ve seen from more
people, and the more I want to use it some more.
Instagram has thus triggered an echo — it feels like Facebook. More
precisely, it feels the way Facebook did from 2009 to 2012, when it silently
crossed over from one of those tech things that some people sometimes did
to one of those tech things that everyone you know does every day.
In some ways, this is not surprising. Instagram has been growing like crazy
essentially since it went live in 2010, and under Facebook — which bought
the company for $1 billion five years ago — it has had ample resources to
keep that up. But with 700 million users, it’s in virtually uncharted territory.
There are bigger networks: Facebook has nearly two billion users a month,
and two instant-messaging apps owned by Facebook, WhatsApp and
Facebook Messenger, have grown past the one-billion-user mark. In China,
WeChat also has more users.
Instagram’s headquarters. About 700 million people now use the photo-sharing service every month, with about 400 million of them checking
in daily. Christie Hemm Klok for The New York Times
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But last year, you might have said there was a question whether a picturebased
service like Instagram could have reached similar scale — whether it
was universal enough, whether there were enough people whose phones
could handle it, whether it could survive greater competition from newer
photo networks like Snapchat. Maybe those problems or others will rear up
in the future, and growth could yet stall. But for now, Instagram seems to
have overcome any perceived hurdles. It seems to have reached escape
velocity.
Mr. Systrom said this plan to rapidly speed up Instagram’s pace of change to
attract more users was deliberate.
“The primary reason we’ve scaled more quickly in the last 100 million is that
we’ve figured out that as we’ve scaled, we’ve had to unbreak ourselves,” he
said. What he meant was that Instagram systematically analyzed all the
bottlenecks to its service and tried to eliminate them. Then it looked for
potential opportunities to better serve users and tried to put them in place
as fast as possible.
This sounds trivial — aren’t allcompanies looking to constantly improve? —
but social networks are sometimes held hostage by their most loyal users,
who tend to hate change (cough, Twitter, cough). Facebook bucked that
trend; as it grew, it constantly adapted its features to become more things to
more people. Mr. Systrom is following the same playbook.
“My favorite thing to ask the team is, how large do you think Instagram will
be eventually?” he said. “Usually you get to some large number, and it’s
definitely more than two times the size we are now. So I can confidently say
that most of the people who’ll eventually use Instagram don’t use Instagram
now.”
Mr. Systrom is a fan of academic business theories, especially Clay
Christensen’s, whose “Innovator’s Dilemma” addresses the tension between
serving an incumbent audience at the expense of a much greater potential
one. The realization that Instagram could become much bigger than it is now
was freeing, Mr. Systrom said; it gives the company the confidence to keep
changing.
Source : NYtimes
