Sign up for my email newsletter

Get new updates, usually once a week – it features long-form essays on what’s going on here in Silicon Valley.

I’ve written 550+ essays which have been featured and quoted in The New York Times, Fortune, Wired, and WSJ. The topics range from mobile product design to fundraising to “growth hacking.”

Thanks for reading. -Andrew

Close

@andrewchen

Subscribe · Featured · Recent essays

Bonus stats: Instagram up 40% in Jan, 300k MAU, 35k DAU (lower bound estimate based on Facebook app activity)

Per my previous post on Quora’s stats via the Facebook interface, I wanted to also share another hot startup at the moment, Instagram. Obviously you can use Instagram without Facebook- for example, only connecting it to Twitter, but again it shows the relative growth. In this case, as a mobile app, there’s very little data about how many folks are using it. Facebook’s data gives us unprecedented detail.

Here are the graphs, from AllFacebook – you can see they’re on a nice growth curve and doing quite well:

Like this post?
Get new updates via newsletter..

  • Anonymous

    How can the number of “monthly average users” go down? I’m assuming that this is the total number of users for the month… so 230,000 or so got rolled over from December, which is why January doesn’t start at zero, right?

    Then, anytime they get a new user, the aggregate number of “monthly average users” goes up…

    What would have to happen for it to go down?

    PS great to see you posting.

  • http://twitter.com/ravi_m ravi mruthyunjaya

    @sethgodin, MAU is monthly “active” users, a rolling aggregate, so its possible they got lesser number of users the last day compared to the day one month ago and MAU went down

  • http://andrewchen.typepad.com Andrew Chen

    what @ravi said ;-) My guess is that the holiday traffic was pretty high, so then as you lose that part of the rolling window and get into late Jan, the numbers there didn’t replace it.

    I’m dipping my toes back into writing again. We’ll see how it goes ;-)

  • http://andrewchen.typepad.com Andrew Chen

    I think this also means that the little dip at the end is probably temporary and will get ironed out soon enough, because it’s part of a cyclical holiday thing.

  • Anonymous

    This is monthly stat for active user thanks for info,!

  • Anonymous

    Thanks this is for active user.

Want more? Featured essays and book recommendations