You may have seen the headlines this week: For the first time,
Instagram surpassed Twitter in average daily mobile visitors last month.
It’s an important milestone in Instagram’s growth, but the August numbers don’t fully reflect the dramatic gains that Instagram has made over the past six months. ComScore, the source of this week’s statistics via its new Mobile Metrix service, dug back and shared comparison mobile data for the two services covering March through August 2012.
In that six-month span, Instagram’s average daily mobile visitors jumped from 886,000 to 7.3 million — that’s a 724 percent gain. Twitter also saw gains, but they were less dramatic and more steady — as you’d expect from a much older and more established service. Twitter went from 5.5 million average daily mobile visitors to about 6.9 million — a 24 percent increase.
It’s probably no coincidence that Instagram’s rise coincides to a large degree with the publicity it garnered from Facebook’s acquisition this spring.
Clarifying The Instagram-Twitter Comparison
The ComScore numbers don’t mean that Instagram has more mobile visitors than Twitter. As AllThingsD (and others) reported yesterday, Twitter’s overall mobile audience in August was about 29 million uniques, compared to about 22 million for Instagram. But the ComScore data show that Instagram’s users are more engaged on a day-to-day basis.
ComScore didn’t share specific numbers on other social networks/services, but the company also tells us that mobile engagement on Facebook is “far higher” than Twitter and Instagram.
The bigger picture, of course, is monetization. Facebook is promising to build out its mobile ads business, and Instagram may be a part of that. But for now, reports suggest that Twitter is making more mobile money than Facebook and is even generating the majority of its ad revenue from mobile.
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