Instagram had more mobile average daily users in August than did Twitter, according to comScore. 7.3 million average versus 6.9 million in the U.S. Month-to-month movements in comScore data aren’t really indicative of anything until they add up to a trend, so don’t over-interpret. Still, that’s not particularly shocking, as photo sharing is more of a mass market phenomenon than is microblogging. So don’t assume Twitter has reached some sort of plateau. And Twitter is still working hard on photos, anyway.
But that may be a false hope. It’s pretty clear that Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram really did lock up mainstream photo-sharing. Shutterstock released documentation today saying it was looking to raise $50 million in its IPO – half the amount it was seeking prior to Facebook’s IPO. Some of that value loss is from social media stock performance disappointment, but you can bet market share plays a role, too.
Here’s some GigaOM Pro analysis on Facebook-Instagram’s likely impact on the market sector. At that point, we said Facebook was still committed to an HTML5 mobile strategy, but likely to offer single-function apps. It did that, and more, and has soured a lot on HTM5. And here’s a little more on overall social media and social tech merger patterns.
