Shares of Facebook, Inc. (FB) are up 0.77% to $114.24 in late trading after R.W. Baird’s Colin Sebastian reiterated his ‘Outperform’ rating and $135 price target, following this morning’s announcement that Instagram photo-sharing service, bought by Facebook in 2012, has reached more than 500 million users, of which 300 million use the service on a daily basis.
Sebastian noted that Instagram’s “growth remains strong despite the relatively large user base,” with daily active users now surpassing that of Twitter (TWTR).
While the Instagram community has more than doubled over the last two years, its user base is still a fraction of the size of parent company Facebook, which has 1.65 billion monthly active users [MAUs]. But Instagram remains larger than Twitter, with 320 million MAUs.
Instagram’s CEO Kevin Systrom revealed that, on an average day, the photo-focused social network sees over 95 million photos and videos shared, and 4.2 billion likes. Instagram also claims that 30 million of the half a billion Instagrammers use their account daily.
Facebook acquired Instagram back in 2012 for $1 billion, but that acquisition is quite small when one considers the fact the social networking giant spend almost $20 billion to acquire WhatsApp in 2013.
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