Meta’s Instagram Hits 3 Billion Monthly Users - Social Media Giant’s Unstoppable Growth

Instagram just crossed the three billion monthly active user threshold - cementing Meta's dominance in the social media landscape.

The Scale of Digital Empire

Three billion users represents nearly 40% of humanity logging into the platform monthly. That's more people than the entire populations of China, India, and the United States combined.

Monetization Machine

Each scroll, like, and share fuels Meta's advertising revenue engine. The platform's growth trajectory continues defying skeptics who predicted social media saturation years ago.

Meta's Metaverse Gambit

While Zuckerberg bets billions on virtual reality, Instagram remains the cash cow funding his futuristic vision. The platform's stickiness proves real-world connections still trump digital avatars.

Wall Street's favorite metric keeps climbing - though you'd think three billion users would be enough to finally make the metaverse division profitable.

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On his own Instagram account, Zuckerberg wrote: “What an incredible community we’ve built here,” noting that the photo-sharing app has achieved the three billion milestone. Meta Platforms acquired Instagram back in 2012 for $1 billion and it has grown exponentially since then.

The three billion figure is the first time that Meta has disclosed Instagram’s monthly active users number since October 2022, when Zuckerberg announced that the app had two billion users per month. With three billion monthly active users, Instagram is now equivalent in size to Meta’s other social media platforms, Facebook and WhatsApp.

Data Dump

Meta announced in April 2024 that it WOULD no longer disclose the monthly and daily active user numbers for its social media apps, including Facebook. The company had previously disclosed the data in its quarterly financial results.

Meta has moved to reporting the number of people using its entire family of apps on a daily basis, essentially lumping the numbers for Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram together. That daily figure reached 3.48 billion in July of this year, according to the company’s latest quarterly print.

Is META Stock a Buy?

The stock of Meta Platforms has a consensus Strong Buy rating among 46 Wall Street analysts. That rating is based on 40 Buy and six Hold recommendations issued in the last three months. The average META price target of $873.88 implies 15.26% upside from current levels.