Are People Abandoning Instagram? Of Course Not - Forbes

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The last Friday of the calendar year is tailor-made for a “slow news day” story. And today’s is that Instagram, the incredibly popular photo-sharing app from Facebook, has lost a breath-taking 25 percent of its user base in just one week! Why? Because, according to AppData, which tracks usage of popular apps that connect via Facebook, “[We are] pretty sure the decline in Instagram users was due to the terms of service announcement.” Before we get to that announcement, however, let’s just put this simply: The story isn’t true.

The announcement in question, concerning Instagram’s policies with regards to advertising, so enraged users that Kevin Systrom, who developed the app and sold his company to Facebook, had backed off and rescinded the change within days. While it’s certainly possible that users haven’t forgiven the transgression and are leaving the service, experience and reality suggest that what’s going on here is something different. That “different thing” is that a decently reputable firm, AppData, which collects information, has for some reason detected a decline in Instagram usage â€" from 16.4 million daily-active users before the change to 12.4 million today â€" and lacking any other explanation has concluded: “It must be thus!”

And everyone ran with it:

• In The New York Post, the headline reads, “Rage Against Rules” and breathless opens with “ Instagram users outraged over new rules made good on their threat to dump the popular photo-sharing app.”
• Stock blogging website The Motley Fool wondered “Is Facebook the Next Instagram?” suggesting the traffic drop would spread from the photo-sharing site to all of parent-company Facebook. “ However, what we do know is that Internet users can be fickle. Once they leave, they don’t come back. Just ask Facebook buddy Zynga. Once players begin dropping off onFarmVille, MafiaWars, or Draw Something, the trend is practically irreversible.” (The fact that Zynga has 270 million monthly-active users for its Facebook apps, according to AppData, a lead of 200 million on second-place Microsoft seems to have escaped the Fool writer, but nevermind.)
• Facebook traded down 3 percent early in the day before closing nearly where it opened.

The question one has to ask is: How could a bunch of people be so non-critical of what seems so wrong on its face?

If you look at the chart that started this ruckus, what you can plainly see is that the drop in users doesn’t coincide at all with the changes in Instagram’s policy around December 17, but instead matches remarkably closely wth Christmas Day. That’s after the policy change had already gone into the dustbin. Fortunately, not all journalists were asleep on this slow news day, however. At Business Insider, they theorized, a change in the way Instagram works might have been responsible for AppData’s reported number. This is a bit arcane, but AppData only measure certain kinds of behavior that link through Facebook â€" logins and interactions through the Facebook site and such â€" but not all Instagram activity goes through Facebook. That’s true for all apps, but a Dec. 21 Instagram update made it easier to use Instagram directly with some built-in features of the iPhone and, of course, a lot of people got new iPhones around Christmas.

But the explanation might be simpler still. TheNextWeb actually bothered to look at data for some other apps. And, wonder of wonder, many apps were down around Christmas. Pinterest was down 27.5 percent, dating/meet-up app Zoosk was down 31 percent, and Yahoo’s Social Bar app was down a stunning 67 percent. Even Spotify, the popular music app, was down 10 percent, suggesting that people were just too darned busy with their families and such to be on their computers!

A reasonably safe bet is that the next time people care enough to look at the data â€" perhaps Valentine’s Day? â€" is that Instagram will be again setting records for usage. It’s been a straight-line up in terms of usage since the app launched just a few years ago. In the meantime, today’s fake news was mostly dead by the time someone bothered to pick up the phone and ask Instagram what was up. Responsible types at the Los Angeles Times actually got a quote from an Instagram rep: ”This data is inaccurate,” an Instagram spokeswoman told The Times. “We continue to see strong and steady growth in both registered and active users of Instagram.”

In other words, there is simply no there, there.

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