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AppData says that Instagram may have lost 25% of users after TOS change
It's a bit far down the page. Not much info but is as follows...
Facebook's (FB) Instagram unit may have lost nearly aquarter of its users after a recent flap over its change in terms of service. That's according to the New York Post, quoting figures fromAppData. Instagram had 16.4 million active daily users the week it rolledout its policy change, but that number has now fallen to 12.4 million.
- wildranter 14y agoThe takeaway point here is this: never let accountants nor lawyers run your business.
- oscargrouch 14y agoThe new CEO is just brilliant! well done!
- frozenport 14y agoAlso the trend is down. So, they keep loosing.
- antidoh 14y agoWhere on CNBC are these "Primer Posts" linked from? In other words, what CNBC page would I bookmark to see the latest one? The best I could come up with is a search, which is silly. http://search.cnbc.com/main.do?target=all&categories=exclude&keywords=primer http://search.cnbc.com/main.do?target=all&categories=exc...
- ja27 14y agoI know several friends that deleted their accounts over what they read about the TOS changes. Not one of them was an actual active user.
- liedra 14y agoWhat's your point? I have several friends (and myself as well) that deleted their accounts and they were actual active users.
- pimeys 14y agoI was a quite active user posting about 1-3 pictures per day, liking stuff and having a bit over hundred followers. I deleted my account after this change. Good riddance Facebook.
- jonknee 14y agoHow do you know they weren't active? You can log on to look at photos and be counted as a Daily Active User. Just like there are tons of lurkers on Twitter.
- mtgx 14y agoToo bad something like that never happened to Facebook itself whenever they pushed for their more aggressive default privacy settings. Maybe that would've forced them to reconsider a little and have more reasonable default privacy settings.
- jQueryIsAwesome 14y agoFacebook is like a basic need now, Instagram is more like a hobby with many acceptable alternatives.
- propercoil 14y agoI think you are getting downvoted because of your username
- jQueryIsAwesome 14y agoNo.
- islon 14y agoThe keyword here is "could".
- kmfrk 14y agoI deleted the one photo in my profile and all my likes - and cleaned up in the accounts I followed - but I'll still see if I can write a personal client that fetches the photos of people I am following and stores any "likes" in my own database. After that - or before, if Instagram insist on changing their rules - I'll probably delete it altogether.
- hrabago 14y agoThis goes on to show that people actually do care about these issues. The problem is that generally people aren't aware of the terms they're agreeing to unless someone breaks down what the TOC actually means, or what the consequences could be.
- freehunter 14y agoThe question Instragram has to answer for themselves is, is losing these users a bad thing? It's an obvious answer, do you want 16 million users who aren't making you a dime, or 12 million users who are able to be monetized? Even if it dropped to one million, one million users making you money is arguably better than any number of users who aren't making you money if you're running a business.
- w1ntermute 14y agoYeah, I really got the feeling that SV had finally jumped the shark when Instagram got sold for $1 billion. How can a service with users, but no clear revenue stream, be valued so highly? It seems like people have gotten too caught up in navel (and traffic stats) gazing to see what's really important when running a business.
- loceng 14y agoIt's all to help bolster the facade that Facebook would be worth $100 billion.
- sek 14y agoFacebook was scared, Instagram had a hockey stick growth and Twitter tried to buy it. It was a defensive move. If Instagrams growth is stopped now, who profits from it? Do users get back to Facebook or other services?
- samstave 14y agoExactly. This is the poster child for "acquihires" in that it was a defensive move to get Instagram user mind share encapsulated into face books properties and an offensive move to prevent any competitors from acquiring the user base's attention.
- w1ntermute 14y agoYou guys are still missing the overriding point. "The user base's attention" has no inherent value. Why is this so difficult to comprehend?
- jstanley 14y agoNot really on topic, but they seem to have missed out an unbelievable number of spaces between words. I wonder what has happened there.
- josephlord 14y agoMaking a judgement on the basis of two datapoints for weekly data where one of the weeks is a major holiday in the biggest relevant markets strikes me as a bad idea. Unless you can use previous years seasonality to adjust the data. It may be that Instagram would normally have an increase rather than a decrease at Christmas but I wouldn't assume that without data.
- tommy_m 14y agoYeah, one out of every four users on FB/Instagram read and understand the TOS, then care enough to stop using the service. That makes perfect sense...
- mrharrison 14y agoNo way, thats completely false. The only people that really care about the TOS or even know whats going on, is us geeks. Normal people on the street don't care or even realize whats going on.
- jeremyarussell 14y agoI'm one nerd, and I know a solid two hundred plus people in real life that asked me what the Instagram thing was all about because they had heard about some stuff and needed clarification. I won't run through what I talked to them about but I can assure you, it is not just nerds and geeks that care about this stuff. The key difference why I got 200+ people IRL asking me questions about Instagram? Because I am patient and can explain things in layman's terms. Non-technical people won't ever ask someone that assumes they don't want to know these things questions regarding these things.
- mrharrison 14y agoDude you just assumed on me. I just dislike when people post bogus articles like this on hacker news. Completely unfounded data. You assumed this data was because of the TOS and so did CNBC to get more page hits. Yes I asked many people who didn't ask me, and they didn't think much of it. http://www.businessinsider.com/bogus-story-about-instagram-losing-users-2012-12 http://www.businessinsider.com/bogus-story-about-instagram-l...
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- jusben1369 14y agoIt's too early to tell if this is good data or not. Assuming it is it begs the question. Why would Instragram's Users (a major % of them) act in a way we've never seen when other SN's pull similar moves? What's so unique about Instagram vs FB and is their any broader lesson to be learned from that?
- rayiner 14y agoAs far as I can tell, it's all about selling peoples' pictures versus using them to leverage targeted ads. I don't think most Instagram users ever thought about how the service would be monetized, but I think even the ones that did assumed it would just be ads like FB, etc. But taking someone's pictures and selling them is a whole different ball game.
- neya 14y agoInstagram is a perfect example of how arrogance could re-define the 'image' of a company. The real problem for Instagram was not about selling its users' photos. The real problem was being 'sneaky as fuck'. If you intend to sell our photos, we actually have no problem. You just have to make it clear to us. But what did Instagram do? Silently update it's terms of service WITHOUT informing its users. Legally, it's not obliged to do so, but when you have tons of data that THE USERS have uploaded, it is YOUR duty to tell us, atleast inform us before trying to sell it. This is what created that public outrage, because Instagram failed to notify any of its users of this change. You can't just walk in one fine day saying, "You know what? All the pictures YOU have taken effort getting it right, will be ours from today, and I guess it's best you don't know about it." Well, fuck you Instagram, you deserved this. When I joined Instagram, I knew someday it would have to make money to sustain and most likely my data would be compromised (something an average user wouldn't realize and would assume it's forever free). Fitting ads somewhere inside your app or on your webpage would have been a much better solution, because it is something the average user would see (and possibly wouldn't mind either). But your sneaky as fuck change in TOS was UNETHICAL. You deserve this. I just hope some other open source app replaces you and your fame fades away. Because you are u.n.e.t.h.i.c.a.l.
- k-mcgrady 14y ago>> If you intend to sell our photos, we actually have no problem I don't think that's true. Anyone I saw that left always made it clear they didn't want Instagram selling their photos and that was their reason for leaving.
- neya 14y agosorry, I meant if they made it clear before-hand like, before joining their service. So you wouldn't be suddenly disappointed like what happened now.
- RyanZAG 14y agoIf they made it clear before-hand, then they would not have acquired the users they did and not sold for a billion. So that is not a good solution at all. Personally, I don't see a solution to this.
- alxndr 14y agoThe CNBC page has one paragraph that mentions Instagram, and cites the New York Post for its info. Here's the NYP article about Instagram: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/business/rage_against_Dh05rPifiXBIJRE1rCOyML http://www.nypost.com/p/news/business/rage_against_Dh05rPifi...
- guelo 14y agoI'm kind of surprised by how small Instagram is. Facebook paid a billion dollars for those 12 million users.
- diego 14y agoThat's more than 1% of Facebook's users. At the time, Facebook was worth 100B.
- jpdevereaux 14y agoBut also consider that many if not most of those users were already on Facebook.
- speeder 14y agoAnd they had reason to LEAVE facebook (or at least, stop being so active on it, and concentrate on twitter).
- antninja 14y agoThey paid a billion dollar to prevent Twitter from having a decent photo service. Facebook doesn't need Instagram. Twitter did.
- ebf 14y agoThose are daily active users. Monthly active users are around 43.6 million. Source: http://www.appdata.com/apps/facebook/124024574287414-instagram http://www.appdata.com/apps/facebook/124024574287414-instagr...
- robinwauters 14y agoSorry but it's bullshit. Apologies for self-promoting my The Next Web article on this, but many popular apps seemingly lost a lot of users according to AppData's data. It doesn't add up at all. http://thenextweb.com/facebook/2012/12/28/no-rage-against-rules/?fromcat=all http://thenextweb.com/facebook/2012/12/28/no-rage-against-ru...
- idunno246 14y agothis. appdata's data fluctuates wildly quite often. given the quality of the inside network blogs, i'd call any of it into doubt
- trustfundbaby 14y agoWhile I want this to be true, the Nextweb rebuttal of this article makes a lot more sense http://thenextweb.com/facebook/2012/12/28/no-rage-against-rules/ http://thenextweb.com/facebook/2012/12/28/no-rage-against-ru.... I'd wait on some better data.
- jacquesm 14y agoWeaselwords like 'may' in the title don't help here. Either they did or they didn't, if you don't know don't bother writing an article.
- Atacat 14y agoThis headline is completely misleading. It was the NY Post's (incorrect) take on the data that was behind this article, not AppData.
- chrisringrose 14y agoIt's a hoax. I'm afraid this is all moot. Instagram didn't lose 25% of it's users. http://gizmodo.com/5971784/instagram-says-25-user-exodus-is-bullshit http://gizmodo.com/5971784/instagram-says-25-user-exodus-is-...