Vine Has A Head Start, But There’s Plenty Of Room For An Instagram Video Win

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Facebook is making an announcement later today that we have heard could do with Instagram, its very popular photo app, getting a video service. If true, Facebook would be entering a crowded market – but one that is nevertheless ripe for the picking, with no single app yet to achieve more than one-tenth of a potential audience.

We got the researchers at Onavo to pull together some statistics for us on how the leading video apps are playing out at the moment, charting what percentage of consumers are accessing these apps each month. (To keep things simple, we kept these numbers restricted to iPhone and U.S.-only.)

Here’s how the market shares of video apps look at the moment:

As you can see, Twitter’s Vine — the newest player on the scene, launching only in January of this year — is far and away the biggest of the top-five video sharing apps. It has 10.7% of all iPhone users monthly. Among the next four biggest — Keek, Cinemagram, Viddy and SocialCam — as of the month of May, not one of them managed to attract more than 0.9% of users. Among those four, Keek is the only one that is not in decline, according to Onavo’s figures.

But Vine’s winning share says something else: it points to how small this market is at the moment. Assuming that most people would not use more than one video app, together all four still make up less than 13% of all iPhone users. On the other hand, as a sign of why Vine specifically might pose a competitive threat to Facebook, it is also the only one of the four video apps that has been growing — and sharply, too.

How much growth is left? Compare the video app proportions to those of photo apps. For all the video apps out there, there are even more photo sharing services, but these are reaching into much bigger proportions of consumers, and bigger overall numbers.

Instagram has been steadily creeping up and is now at 35.5%; while the second-largest, Snapchat, is at just under half that size, at 16.8%; Flickr is at 1.15%; and Facebook’s own camera is at 0.46%. (In the last quarter, Facebook noted that Instagram has now passed 100 million monthly active users, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they updated that number today. That is, if the news is about Instagram.)

While Snapchat is the opposite of a public posting site — the ephemeral quality is something that Facebook itself tried to mimic in its own Poke app — it’s notable that Snapchat lets people take both photos and video. And I don’t think the feature growth will end there: I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see it move into more ways of “sharing” pictures longer term, and possibly attracting people away from sites like Instagram. (There’s  another story to tell here, too, about how Yahoo will need to startmaking good use of all its new acquisitions and talent fast to turn around things like that paltry Flickr mobile audience share. Another time.)

Indeed, while Instagram looks like the clear winner now, we are still far from being in a saturated market in photo apps. Video looks small compared to photo, but when you compare photo app use to social networking app use, it also pales. Facebook, notes Onavo, is currently being used by some 72.40% of users. Twitter is in second at 27.10%, with Pinterest at 10.90% and LinkedIn at 9.65%.

THE VIDEO OPPORTUNITY

Video, and specifically video with a social and/or mobile spin, are hot tickets at the moment. For consumer apps and websites, video provides a route to picking up more users, getting those users to spend more time on their networks, and possibly laying the groundwork for brand-friendly advertising. For users, the rise of smartphones with good cameras, combined with a surge of interest to document our lives and share those clips with others over better and faster networks, are all contributing to a boom in the market.

But it’s not at all a sure-fire formula. Lightt, a video taking, editing and sharing app that is popular with Instagrammers, is currently getting a lot of prominence from Apple in the “new and noteworthy” and “photo & video” sections of the App Store. But Lightt didn’t make the top-four cut, Onavo tells me.

We’ll see if that changes. Backed by investors like Maveron; and founded by Alex Mostoufi, who also started up and then sold me.com to Apple, Lightt is still young and may yet have some more flashes left in it. Mostoufi tells me that it’s currently “doubling and sometimes tripling” its user base every week.

Source: Instagram Will Get Video On June 20

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We’ve been working on getting more details on a press event that Facebook is having this week. Earlier, we wrote it could launch a news-reading app, but we have since heard more details that point to something else entirely. On June 20, a source says Facebook will unveil that Instagram, its popular photo-sharing app, will begin to let people also take and share short videos. Call it the Vine effect.

We are still looking for more information because we understand that Facebook has not wanted the details of June 20 to leak out — so this could be an intentional blind alley. But if the Instagram video report is true, you could say the event invite itself — sent by snail mail, coffee cup stain charmingly in one corner — is a red herring of its own.

Earlier reports about Instagram getting video provide some indication, though, that this is not coming out of the blue. Most recently, about three weeks ago Matthew Keys broke a story noting that such a service was getting tested internally. At the time, there wasn’t any information on when it would be coming out, nor whether there would be filters, nor whether this would be in a separate app or part of an Instagram update. The videos would be between five and 10 seconds in length, he noted.

Getting video on Instagram is a move that would make sense. Specifically, it looks like a direct response to the rising popularity of video-sharing services, namely Twitter’s Vine. It, and others like Viddy, Cinemagram and Socialcam, sometimes get described as “Instragram for video” apps.

The Vine app — which lets users take six seconds of video footage on an iOS or Android handset and then share those clips to Vine’s own network, Twitter or Facebook — has shot up in popularity since going live in January. After Twitter debuted an Android version of Vine in the beginning of June, usage reached a tipping point: shares of Vines surpassed those of Instagram photos on Twitter — usage that has only diverged even more since then:

Of course, you could argue that part of the reason is because Twitter no longer shows inline views of Instagram photos — that may have affected how many Instagram photos have been shared to Twitter.

When those Instagram/Twitter cards disappeared, we noted that part of the reason for the move — taken by Facebook/Instagram, not Twitter — appeared to be to drive more direct traffic to Instagram itself, a popular social network in its own right, with over 100 million monthly active users, rising sharply since Facebook bought the company last year for $715 million.

Putting in a video service could serve to further that strategy even more, before new-but-already-popular services like Vine get more of a foothold. It will mean one less app and social network for users to build up, and, for those who like to take and share videos, another reason to visit Instagram. You can see how something like video could be a very sticky complement to its photo service.

There could be another reason for adding video to the service: it’s a very attractive medium for advertisers and marketers.

Of course, Instagram is not running any ads yet — in fact, Facebook and Instagram got a lot of heatover changes in their terms of service in December over how it could implement advertising services in the future — so much heat that they rolled back the ToS and apologized. And in Facebook’slast quarterly earnings call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg made a point of noting that while big brands were interested in advertising on Instagram, for now there were no plans to implement this. (That’s not to say that Instagram is not already a substantial marketing platform for brands.)

And with 100 million+ users, you could argue that there may not be enough scale there yet to really monetize ads properly. Adding in video is laying the groundwork — and providing one more engine to grow that Instagrammer base.

Instagram Hits 100 Million Monthly Users 28 Months After Launch

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From just two guys at rented desks to a $715 million sale to Facebook, a second wind on Android and a mess of privacy scares, Instagram today announced 100 million people use it every month to share the way they see the world. The startup hedged its bets by being acquired just as it expanded beyond iOS, but despite what it could have sold for now, there’s no disputing Instagram’s success.

In a heartfelt blog post that smooths over the rough patches, co-founder and CEO Kevin Systrom explains the journey to building an app that’s created “a world more connected and understood through photographs.”

The untold story is that Instagram made a tough decision right after its April 3rd launch on Android. Before that it had 30 million installs on iOS. Whether it would succeed outside of the design-focused iPhone was a gamble. It could have flopped, attrition could have set in, and it was still small enough to be vulnerable to competitors. So despite racking up 1 million new users in the first 12 hours, there was a lot to lose. $1 billion (at the time) in cash and stock from Facebook for a company with just 13 employees was too good to pass up, so it sold.

If Systrom had foreseen what would happen next, he may have held out longer. The Android app maintained its sprint, and the iPhone version continued to pick up steam. Even without much help from Facebook, and in fact despite Facebook’s own competitor Camera, the Instagram juggernaut could not be stopped.

At over three times as many users now as when it sold, and seemingly beyond quick disruption, would Instagram have sold for $2 billion or even $3 billion today? Would anyone have been willing to pay that? Remember this was when fervor was frothy for the coming Facebook IPO. Social companies still saw going public as a lucrative option.

But Systrom chose to become a made-man (and make made-men out of many of his employees), rather than roll the dice. He chose greater impact by aligning with the world’s premier social network over total control. He still runs Instagram somewhat independently from Facebook, so he may be getting to have his cake and eat it too.

Instagram Reports 90M Monthly Active Users, 40M Photos Per Day And 8500 Likes Per Second

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Instagram reported a few usage stats today, marking the first time it has talked about numbers on its own site since the kerfuffle raised over its terms of service change following the Facebook buy-out. The internal stats show strong engagement, and user growth, rather than a decline in active Instagram members, as first reported by AllThingsD. Part of the discrepancy between the these numbers and third-party doom and gloom reports may have to do with the fact that Instagram is tracking monthly active users, of which it has 90 million, versus the less stable daily active users stat often cited by others.

Other stats listed by the mobile photo sharing app tackle the specific ways users engage with Instagram. 40 million photos are posted daily to the service, for instance, and its users manage to rack up 8,500 likes and 1,000 comments per second. That’s a strong indicator that whatever the reaction to Instagram’s proposed TOS changes, plenty of them are still interacting with the service at a breakneck pace. Mike Isaac at AllThingsD also points out that while the 90 million figure being reported today may look weak compared to the 100 million users it reported last September, these are specifically active accounts, where previously the company only shared data on straightforward registrations, which means total registered users is probably much higher at this point.

Instagram on iPhone Gets a Fresh Filter, Facebook Login, Apolog

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Kevin Systrom has had quite the busy week.

Fresh from nixing his revamped terms of service that caused such a stir on Tuesday -- and doing a 180-degree turn on those terms of service Thursday -- the Instagram co-founder has launched a significant update to his iPhone app.

The update adds a brand-new photo filter, "Mayfair", which brings the app's total number of filters up to 20. Its previous update, just 10 days ago, also added a new filter, "Willow". This is a veritable flurry of new filters by Instagram's standards; prior to Willow, the app hadn't added any new filters since September 2011.

What The Twitter/Instagram Standoff Has Meant For Traffic To Instagram

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When Instagram began to pull its inline previews of photos out of Twitter almost two weeks ago, many did not take that turn of events too well. Consumers like things easy, and clicking out of one app or site to go elsewhere is not always the best experience.

Instagram, it appears, did this to drive more traffic directly to its own site — a move complemented by a couple of others, such as the newly expanded instagram.com with user profiles, and today’s changes to Instagram’s terms of service and privacy policies, which included new developments in advertising on the service (specifically: it is coming, you may not know very obviously when it is there, and you might just end up part of it).

Instagram Co-founder Kevin Systrom Says It Is Committed To “Answering Questions And Fixing Mistakes”

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In a very carefully worded blog post penned by Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom, he laid out what Facebook and Instagram will do to answer any and all questions that users might have over the recent privacy and terms of service changes.

This was the “Beacon-Like” response we were anticipating:

I’m writing this today to let you know we’re listening and to commit to you that we will be doing more to answer your questions, fix any mistakes, and eliminate the confusion. As we review your feedback and stories in the press, we’re going to modify specific parts of the terms to make it more clear what will happen with your photos.

Along with the post, Systrom re-iterates that Facebook is not “selling” your photos to anyone, as in that’s not their intention. Not that it never will. He says that ownership rights stay with its users, and nothing has changed on the privacy front.