Instagram beats odds to hit 100 million monthly active users mark

Congratulations are in order for Instagram for bouncing right back into the game following a privacy fiasco to post the figure of a whopping 100 million monthly active users today.

Kevin Systrom, co-founder of Instagram, announced that Instagram reached the magical 100 million figure through an emotional blog post detailing how the company started off with barely a few thousand users in October 2010 to reach this landmark.

Instagram has more than proved its salt by breaching this figure at a time when naysayers had written it off thanks to the exodus the change in its Terms of Conditions had sparked off. “Now, more than ever, people are capturing the world in real-time using Instagram – sharing images from the farthest corners of the globe,” an exuberant Systrom wrote.

100 million users strong!

The app now boasts staggering figures of 40 million photos per day, 8500 likes per second and 1000 comments per second.

Instagram has found itself surrounded by controversy ever since Facebook closed the deal of its purchase in September 2012. Starting with its very public fallout with Twitter, Instagram found itself sinking into a pit of quicksand. Once Twitter’s darling, Instagram halted card support to Twitter even as the micro-blogging website started its own in-app photo editing service. Posting an Instagram image on Twitter now merely displays a link instead of the image coming up in the drawer. Past Instagram thumbnails too disappeared from the service.

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Then came Instagram’s lowest point that put user privacy under a cloud. The photo-sharing app proposed a change in its Terms of Service that made it look like Instagram was going to claim ownership of all user-generated images and would even have the authority to sell them for advertising purposes. Users were understandably up in arms over their privacy. National Geographic even put out a notice saying that it would stop using Instagram till the company rolled back its Terms of Services.

Instagram apologised to its users about the “confusion” caused with regard to the language in its legal terms that made them believe that Instagram would own their images. Nearly as soon as the controversy broke out, Kevin Systrom, co-founder of Instagram, promptly released a blog post to clear the air, saying that Instagram had no intentions of selling user-generated content or to allow photos to be used in advertisements. “To be clear: it is not our intention to sell your photos. We are working on updated language in the terms to make sure this is clear,” Systrom said in the blog.

Asserting that Instagram does not own any photos submitted by users, Systrom wrote,”Instagram users own their content and Instagram does not claim any ownership rights over your photos. Nothing about this has changed. We respect that there are creative artists and hobbyists alike that pour their heart into creating beautiful photos, and we respect that your photos are your photos. Period.”

In a move to calm users down, the company promptly rolled back to the existing Terms of Services that had been in existence ever since the beginning. Instagram bounced back from the controversy by appeasing users and slowly reclaiming lost ground to post a figure of 90 million active users in January. If there ever was a success story of a social networking website, it would have to be Instagram.