I have some news for Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, co-founders of Instagram, a San Francisco-based, photo-oriented, social network: They are the fastest growing photo sharing service on Twitter. I’m not surprised. As you know, many folks take photos and share them via Twitter, thanks to services like Twitpic, Yfrog and even Twitter itself. However, Instagram is slightly different; if you’re an iPhone user, you take a photo, upload to Instagram, then share it on Twitter.
Skylines, a Dutch startup focused on real-time photo search, has been analyzing the Twitter feed and has some unique insights into the market. From May 23 to June 26, 2011, Skylines found Instagram usage has gone up 38 percent: from 538,000 photos shared weekly to 740,000 photos shared each week.
Instagram CEO Systrom had recently observed that only 11 percent of Instagram members were using Twitter and by that metric, Instagram members might be adding about a million photos a day to Instagram. Add those two data points together, and one can extrapolate that Instagram is gathering steam. The service recently passed the five million subscriber mark. This level of engagement is one of the reasons why I believe Instagram has a chance of becoming the mobile social hub.
Skylines also shared some other data for the five-week period analysis.
- From May 23rd to June 26, 2011, there were 33 million photos shared on Twitter via Twitpic, Yfrog, Instagram and Mobypicture (the four services indexed by Skylines).
- Twitpic is no slouch. It was responsible for sharing of 3.295 million photos during the week of June 20, making it the largest photo-sharing service.
- Yfrog was used to share 2.98 million photos during the same week.
- The growth in the total number of photos shared in the five-week period measured was 17 percent.
- Only 4 percent of the pictures are geo-tagged, while 15 percent have a hashtag.
- Not surprisingly, weekends are the most popular days to share photos.
As the data shows, while Twitter might have launched its own photo sharing service via Photobucket, the independent photo-sharing services have not seen any kind of slowdown, though there are some dark clouds looming ahead for the likes of Twitpic and Yfrog.
| Week starting | 5/23/2011 | 5/30/2011 | 6/6/2011 | 6/13/2011 | 6/20/2011 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Raw numbers of pictures /week | ||||||
| 538,048.00 | 600,911.00 | 635,489.00 | 703,298.00 | 740,390.00 | 3,218,136.00 | |
| twitpic | 2,900,928.00 | 2,971,766.00 | 3,062,148.00 | 3,189,700.00 | 3,294,914.00 | 15,419,456.00 |
| yfrog | 2,562,306.00 | 2,699,349.00 | 2,792,809.00 | 2,903,831.00 | 2,979,214.00 | 13,937,509.00 |
| mobypicture | 43,111.00 | 45,962.00 | 45,639.00 | 45,344.00 | 44,568.00 | 224,624.00 |
| Total pictures / week | 6,044,393.00 | 6,317,988.00 | 6,536,085.00 | 6,842,173.00 | 7,059,086.00 | 32,799,725.00 |
| Percentage of total pictures shared per service | ||||||
| 8.90% | 9.51% | 9.72% | 10.28% | 10.49% | 9.81% | |
| twitpic | 47.99% | 47.04% | 46.85% | 46.62% | 46.68% | 47.01% |
| yfrog | 42.39% | 42.72% | 42.73% | 42.44% | 42.20% | 42.49% |
| mobypicture | 0.71% | 0.73% | 0.70% | 0.66% | 0.63% | 0.68% |
| Growth compared to previous week | ||||||
| 11.68% | 5.75% | 10.67% | 5.27% | 37.61% | ||
| twitpic | 2.44% | 3.04% | 4.17% | 3.30% | 13.58% | |
| yfrog | 5.35% | 3.46% | 3.98% | 2.60% | 16.27% | |
| mobypicture | 6.61% | -0.70% | -0.65% | -1.71% | 3.38% | |
| Total market growth per week | 4.53% | 3.45% | 4.68% | 3.17% | 16.79% | |
| Source: Skylines | ||||||
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