Data & Research

Instagram took almost a year before breaking top 10 in most countries

Slow grind to overnight success

Instagram took almost a year before breaking top 10 in most countries
Instagram took almost 12 months to break the top 10 charts in most major countries including the US, Germany, and Canada.

App store analysis firm Distimo has released new data detailing the popular photo app's rise to fame, which was recently acquired by Facebook for the hefty sum of $1 billion.

New information shows that while the app topped the photography charts with ease, it has struggled to gain similar status in the overall top charts.

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As the bar below graph shows, Japan made Instagram one of its favourite apps in just two weeks with Italy and Australia following behind.

UK and France were last on the uptake with both countries taking 540 and 545 days respectively.



Distimo notes that it took two months for China to make Instagram its top photography app because users in the country prefer similar apps which benefit from local network sharing such as Sina, QQ Space, me2day.

However, when Instagram was launched on Android, it chose not to categorise itself as a photography app but instead a social one.

Because of this, it reached the number one spot in social apps in the US, UK, Australia, Canada, and Italy in just 10 days.

On the up and up

Distimo found that daily downloads for Instagram were under 10,000 12 months ago, but by April, those numbers had exceeded 100,000 daily.



As the above chart shows, growth in both downloads of Instagram and both the number of photos posted on Twitter using the photo-sharing app has been steadily rising since May 2011, with Twitter traffic up strongly in recent months, also strengthening downloads.

[source: Distimo]

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