Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp might have been a smart move from a business perspective, but both the platforms are now giving some tough competition to Facebook’s own social media identity. According to a new report from market intelligence company SimilarWeb, users in the United States spend nearly the same amount of time on the Instagram app on a daily basis as they do on Facebook.
As per SimilarWeb’s report, the average amount of time spent on the Instagram app is 53 minutes per day, while that on the Facebook app stands at a close 58 minutes per day. The number of minutes users spend on a daily basis on Instagram’s arch-rival, Snapchat, stand at 49.5 minutes.
While the numbers certainly make a point, the growth in the average number of minutes spent on the Instagram app per day has seen a steady rise, recording a sharp increase between May and June. However, the daily usage statistics published by SimilarWeb only account for the figures amassed by the three apps on the Android platform.
The daily usage figures for Facebook’s Android app declined between January and March, around the same time when the Cambridge Analytica data harvesting scandal was at the center of media attention, but interestingly, Instagram emerged unscathed from the controversy and kept growing. It appears that despite the huge backlash, Instagram usage in the US remained unaffected by the controversy as the average daily app usage figures kept on rising during the period of turmoil.
The new findings indicate that Instagram has carved a unique identity of its own and might even eclipse the Facebook app on Android one day if the same growth trend continues. Instagram already has over a billion users across the world and is expected to reach the 2 billion user milestone in the next five years, riding the wave of a younger audience.
