Thursday, March 10, 2011

Instagram Wave

Instagram 365: #14Image by exoskeletoncabaret via Flickr
TechCrunch: Instagram Now Adding 130,000 Users Per Week: An Analysis: Since launching just six months ago, Instagram has quickly become one of the web’s top photo sharing services. The company recently passed the two million user mark and announced the launch of their API....... Instagram is currently adding 130,000 registered users per week ..... Instagram’s 2.2 million users upload 3.6 million new photos per week (or 6 photos per second) ..... 37.5 percent of registered users have never uploaded a photo ..... 5 percent of users have uploaded over 50 photos ..... 65 percent follow nobody, and only 12 percent of users follow more than 10 people .....For users who upload at least one photo, there is a 45 percent chance they will upload a photo the following week ..... Those same users have a 25 percent chance they will upload a photo 12 weeks later, representing a significantly stronger retention rate than Twitter...... If it maintains its current pace, Instagram will continue to add a million new registered users every two months. ..... 37% of Instagram’s users have never uploaded a single photo and 65% have uploaded fewer than three photos. ..... This glut of inactive users is common in free online services, as we saw in our studies of Twitter Data and Foursquare Data last year. This isn’t necessarily a lack of total engagement, as users can use the app to simply follow their friends’ photo streams. ...... over half of Instagram’s users are following exactly one other user, with another 13% not following anyone ..... the vast majority of users who follow only one other user are following the “Instagram Team” account ..... 65% of users effectively follow no one. ...... Only 12% of users are following more than 10 people. ...... 76% of those users who upload their first photo go on to upload a second, 85% of those users go on to upload a third, and so on. ...... average time between any two uploads made by a single user is 43 hours ..... With each new photo uploaded by a user, the expected time until they upload their next photo decreases. ...... 45% of users are still uploading photos in Week 2, but that number drops down to around 25% by Week 12...... users who continue to upload are uploading photos at a faster rate as time goes on. ...... users acquired during such press flashes are, on average, more likely to churn than new users who came in through other channels. We’ve seen this trend in countless other businesses.
Greplin is a sibling company to Google. Greplin is a search engine. (Greplin: The First Y Combinator Company To Get Me Excited) The Huffington Post is a content company. It is pre Google.

It has been my contention that Instagram has been a sibling company to FourSquare and Gowalla. It is a check in company. Only you are not checking into a physical space, a business establishment, but rather a moment. It has hit some kind of a sweet spot.