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Instagram Loses Almost Half Its Daily Users In a Month
redletterdave writes "Instagram scared off a lot of users back in December when it decided to update its original Terms of Service for 2013. But even though the company reneged on its new terms after a week of solid backlash, Instagram users are still fleeing the photo-sharing app in droves. According to new app traffic data, Instagram has lost roughly half of all its active users in the month since proposing to change its original Privacy Policy and Terms of Service. In mid-December, Instagram boasted about 16.3 million daily active users; as of Jan. 14, Instagram only has about 7.6 million daily users." Towards the end of December data showing a 25% drop in Instagram's daily active users came out. While it caused quite a bit of discussion online, it was suggested that the decline was due to the Christmas holiday or an inaccuracy in the data.
Just wondering why I should care is all.
Sent from my ENIAC
"In droves" not "in troves."
My proximate annoyance was the Instagram/Twitter war. Much less convenient to post things there now.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Although probably hard to determine, I would venture to guess that Instagram blocking access of their images to Twitter had a bigger effect.
Pentagrams are gaining popularity
Does that mean it's only worth $356 million dollars now? Zuckerberg is so fired. Oh wait...
Obviously, it was caused by an inaccuracy in the data.
The data that the execs thought indicated they could steal other people's work of art.
Say bye bye!
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
"In droves" not "in troves."
Perhaps that was a reference to the treasure troves of looted art the execs thought to steal from the artist creators?
Thus, troves would be correct.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Key features of Instagram are image enhancement filters with pseudo HDR reconstruction, which is great, but it will be catched, the sooner or the later. So, unless they act in a *very* kind way, they'll die in favor of Twitter and Facebook. IMO, it makes no sense for some minor player to fool around with their temporary momentum: be nice, or die, you insensitive clods.
http://xkcd.com/1150/
A change in usability could explain the drop in users, or maybe it was a fad and people have moved on to something else. Most of social media is faddish. It's like the night club business. It's very difficult to maintain popularity, even if you achieve success, because people are moving on to the next hot club.
Really, I'm truly ignorant to what Instagram is, aside from being able to take a pic and share it to social sights. Is that is all there is to it?
I suppose. I was thinking it more accurately demonstrated the illusion of worth of any web-supplied service. Popularity != true value.
Sent from my ENIAC
"Ohh no, the startup I've been storing my pictures with has been bought out by a company that changed its ToS to include terms someone on the internet told me not to agree with. The best way to solve this problem is by storing my pictures with another startup that doesn't have such a disagreeable ToS. Problem solved forever."
Strawmanning is fun sometimes.
The sooner instagram dies the better. There are great cameras in smartphones now, it's crazy people want to make their photos look like crap with filters.
You should of gone with http://xkcd.com/605/
Comparing December to January numbers is moronic.
You're really gonna blame this on Christmas? You're really trying to tell me that Instagram users WOULDN'T have otherwise taken a billion anachronistic photos of their Wii U/cheap tablet/etc. that look like they were taken in the eighties? I call boolshit.
Do you see what I did there?
It was bound to crash. How long does making your picture look like it was taken on a 1969 Instamatic keep being interesting? Especially when everyone is doing it. I mean does anyone think taking picture of yourself in a mirror in your underwear is a business model? Because Instagram is like that.
Like perhaps the holidays are over? I'm sure a bump in the number of users could be due to the holidays and snapping lots of photos of family and their holiday preparations and such.
And now, a month later, the holidays are over and the drab January days are here. Which likely means well, there's less stuff to post about?
That's like saying Apple is failing because their iPhone sales are falling in January after spiking in November-December. January is a very slow month to begin with for most businesses (especially after the holiday bills come due), and likely, is very slow because it's a drab month to begin with.
Imagine if we did this to services we dislike more often? Democracy still works folks.
Why would anyone be surprised that a low-tier service for lazy people to do little more than crop photos and apply crappy-looking digital filters loses market share when said service announces that they're effectively going to steal all their user's photos?
Not troves.
I hate instagram and FB and all my friends and i'm old and stupid, but, i'm also in web analytics, and comparing mid-January to mid-December doesn't make any sense. I mean, I can't think of one, maybe there's some reason that in mid-december, people might be taking a lot more pictures than at other times of the year. Oh wait, I can think of one. A giant one. The biggest one all year.
Or maybe there were more devices going into new owners' hands in mid-december and THAT drove up usage like crazy. Or maybe people take more pictures when they're not at work, and lots of people have lots of days off in Dec and not in Jan. Or maybe oh forget it you get the point.
Compare this week this year to this week last year in December, then do the same in January, and THEN we can talk. Was the week-to-week change different last year? Otherwise you end up with dumb crap like this. Oh, hey, did you hear that Amazon's revenues are down 48% vs. four weeks ago? THEY"RE DOOOOOMED because I'm an idiot.
NEXT.
god is just pretend.
I know a lot of people who are twitter users and were pissed off at Instagram when they broke Twitter integration. The unfavorable TOS just was the last straw to get Tweeters to leave in droves.
Got Greedy
Services like instagram absolutely require user submissions to survive. They make their money on advertising and that only works if they have stuff that people want to come and see. Since they have no content creation arm, they rely on user submissions. Piss off the users, and they've got nothing and they are boned.
It would be more like if the guy in the comic was leaving all sorts of cool antique items in Chad's garage and Chad was charging others to come and look at them, but was still saying he was going to take and sell them.
Given that Zuckerberg has so good relations with Wall Street folks, that they decided to con Facebook shareholders to make him richer by pumping Facebook stock prior to IPO (typically they undervalue stock to make themselves richer - or at least used to), I doubt Instagram fiasco will have meaningful impact on Zuckerberg's business. Whatever disastrous deal this guy will do, he will be afloat anyway. Is Zuckerberg the new Murdoch ?
Maybe the real problem with Instagram was just that it wasn't particularly useful?
In their defense... fucking over your customer is the new normal?
What, you think they're association with banks and brokerages is rubbing off?
I might have to rethink who I thought had the Midas poo touch. For a long time I thought it might be EA, because everything they touch seems to turn to shit. Now I'm leaning toward Facebook. And HP and SONY are solidly in the running there, too. So many companies with the Midas poo touch. You'd think "not treating your customers with contempt" would be a fairly easy lesson to learn. And yet, here we are...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The rest of them were lost due to people realising they were silly for wanting to deliberately degrade the quality of their photos.
I'm going to go out on a limb and speculate Instagram's decline in user activity has a lot more to do with a rise in popularity in Snapchat than their TOS snafu. I don't know how popular Snapchat has gotten, but the college kids I teach were raving about it.
Do you really think 99% of people out there really care what happens with their data or their rights? Instagram's decline has nothing to do with the TOS or privacy policy. It service based on a fad. The fad is no longer cool. Instagram is over.
Fast Federal Court and I.T.C. updates
That shatters Netflix's record of 900,000 (approx 2% if I recall).
One mistake that makes you uncool, and it's downhill from there.
They already had pretty lousy terms to start with. Nobody reads terms when they sign up. They only start getting enraged once somebody else tells them the terms suck, usually after they get changed and people influential enough to be listened to complain vocally. In fact, Instagram merely made the terms more specific and by doing so, allowed users more freedom in a lot of cases than with the previous terms. The only real difference was that they actively stated that they might print ads over users pictures when displaying them. They already had that right with the previous terms, so meh.
The true lesson here is that people should read terms before they sign up and if a company makes the terms illegible, they should vocally complain to the company about the terms being illegible. Since most people can't be bothered, they end being part of a human centipede. I guess people need to have that happening to them every once in a while to be reminded that there's no such thing as a free lunch and if you're not paying, you're the product.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Due to the fact that they didn't DOUBLE the user count in response to " due to the holidays and snapping lots of photos of family and their holiday preparations and such".
http://www.wired.com/business/2012/09/instagram-use-exploding/ for the period of 03-2012 till 09-2012. That is not a "holiday run up". And, even if people were snapping fewer photos - they wouldn't TERMINATE the accounts, just stop using...
It's one of many downsides to a global economy. With seven billion prospective customers you can afford to target only those who are stupid and lack self-respect. The rest of us are boned, all we can do is bitch, and refuse to go along with the stupidity.
Sadly, one thing the big tech success stories of recent years have proved beyond any doubt is that a lot of people will place convenience and cheapness above almost anything else, including quality, customer service, respect for privacy, etc.
This will continue unless and until enough people (a) make it clear that they would prefer to have a better product and better service from the business running it, and (b) are willing to pay enough actual money for it that it becomes commercially attractive.
What we seem to have today is a curious distribution of customers/commercial interest. There are mass-market, cheap and nasty products that make money on sheer volume (or even make money based on the mere expectation of making actual money from sheer volume one day). That includes the "you are the product" services where you don't pay any money at all to use them. To some extent it also includes creative industries with the ever-present IP and black market/piracy issues. Then there's a middle-ground, where the products and service are qualitatively better than the cheap junk and the price is higher accordingly, but there are enough people paying the higher price to keep these offers accessible below the die-hard specialist/enthusiast/elite market who will pay just about anything to have the best possible stuff. And finally, sometimes there are very high-end products that do a much better job and come with good service, but they have a much smaller potential market because of the price tag they come with, so it's mostly only that enthusiast crowd who buy.
Unfortunately, often that middle ground doesn't really exist in a given market because it's too hard for commercial organisations to identify and target it, and sometimes the high end of the market is barren or empty as well, leaving cheap junk the only option left. Economic theory might suggest that if enough people want better products and are willing to pay more for them then someone will come along and fill the gap, but so far that theory isn't standing up well to modern market dynamics where competition doesn't always work as well as it's "supposed to" for various reasons: literally global networking effects, artificial barriers to competition, and other such factors that can create a huge advantage for an incumbent with a mass market cheap and nasty product and a war chest.
I'm optimistic that this is just growing pains as we learn to cope with the implications of modern technologies and truly global markets with near-instant feedback, and that in time (perhaps after the global economy recovers from the current extended mess) new players really will enter the markets and start to compete on genuine quality and customer service again. If it becomes clear that this is still a viable option, then it's possible that businesses who treat their customers well could take advantage of the same modern efficiencies and word-of-mouth advertising to rise rapidly, and I think cultural change from apathy to acceptance or even positive support for such models is not only plausible but potentially something that could happen very quickly if momentum builds.
However, I fear the situation is going to continue deteriorating for a while longer before it starts to pick up, and I do worry that an entire generation may be growing up never knowing the alternatives or understanding the hidden prices they pay for what they use today. It's going to be hard for cultural change to happen if a significant chunk of the population have no concept of what the alternative might be.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Are shitting all over their employees.
Shareholders are next. Depression 20-teens here we come!
I'm guessing the final decision maker at Instagram either had to be a socially out of touch person who had no idea that change would upset their users or s/he had to be a ballsy semi-sociopathic Gordon Geko corporate raider type seeing what s/he could get away with.
Another possibility could be that the person who made that decision had both qualities.
Either way, it is for the best as Instagram's example will likely slow down similar abuses by social media in the future.
meaning the 50% of users they have left were always fake, perhaps?
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
I left instagram a few weeks ago. Not due to the new rules. But to its amount of problems. a) The privacy settings are a joke! b) Spamers/clickforlikes flooded my pictures. c) Most pictures where either stolen or ego-pics of duck-face teen girls or boys trying to show off their tiny muscles. d) the client sucked
"Never EVER mess with a jumper you don't know about, even if it's labeled 'sex and free beer'." - Dave Haynie