Applications: Instagram surpasses TikTok in downloads – 03/08/2024 – Market

Instagram overtook TikTok in new app downloads last year, with growth driven by copying its Chinese rival’s success and now focusing on short-form videos.

The total number of Instagram app downloads grew 20% in 2023 to 768 million compared to the previous year, according to market intelligence firm Sensor Tower, making it the most downloaded app in the world.

Downloads of TikTok, owned by Beijing-based ByteDance, rose just 4% to 733 million over the same period.

Statistics suggest that Meta’s photo-sharing platform is having success in attracting new users, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg having identified the growth of TikTok as one of the biggest threats to his social media empire.

In 2020, Instagram introduced “reels,” a feature that allowed users to share short clips, cloning TikTok’s viral video features that had won over millions of Gen Z consumers.

“Instagram has surpassed TikTok in adoption in recent years, driven by the popularity of its reels feature alongside the social network’s legacy features and functionality,” said Abraham Yousef, senior insights manager at Sensor Tower.

There are also signs that TikTok’s growth has begun to stagnate for the first time since its launch in 2016.

Instagram’s number of monthly active users has reached 1.47 billion, with an increase of 13 million in the last quarter of 2023, according to Sensor Tower. TikTok’s active users reached 1.12 billion, with a drop of 12 million in the last three months of last year.

However, TikTok continues to get better engagement from its more than 1 billion active users around the world. Users spent an average of 95 minutes on TikTok in the fourth quarter of last year, compared to 62 minutes on Instagram, 30 minutes on X and 19 minutes on Snapchat.

Mark Shmulik, an analyst at Bernstein, said Instagram has managed to keep existing users on its app through its foray into short-form videos, meaning that for “TikTok’s next group of potential users, there is no incentive to switch “.

He added that influencers have also been increasingly attracted to Instagram. For these content creators, Shmulik said TikTok was a better place to achieve overnight viral success, while its US rival was a better platform for making money from a follower base.

While TikTok has grown rapidly thanks to its algorithm that serves users with clips that match their preferences with other viral content, Meta invested last year in artificial intelligence to strengthen its recommendation system.

Meta’s chief financial officer Susan Li said last month that Instagram was “making solid progress increasing the freshness of recommended content.”

Instagram has also benefited from ByteDance’s policy of allowing users to download watermarked videos from TikTok that can be shared across different social media platforms, originally designed to promote the visibility of the Chinese-owned app.

An area of ​​growing success for ByteDance is e-commerce thanks to TikTok Shop, which allows brands and merchants to sell products marketed through short videos.

Sensor Tower estimates that ByteDance brought in more than $4 billion in revenue through in-app purchases last year, compared to $143 million for Instagram.

In 2023, TikTok Shop generated $1.1 billion in gross merchandise revenue in the US, the total value of goods sold on its platform, according to TikTok’s internal financial statistics seen by the Financial Times. So far in 2024, this company has surpassed more than $500 million in GMV in the US.

Meta and TikTok did not respond to requests for comment