Instagram’s Snapchat copying is paying off

Instagram has just crossed another milestone, hitting 600 million monthly active users.

For reference, the service hit 500 million monthly active users back in July, along with 300 million daily active users. Instagram hasn’t updated the number of daily active users, so perhaps that number hasn’t crossed a major milestone, but it still shows Instagram has plenty of momentum for a six-year old app. In fact, its growth rate has increased, as it only took the app six months to add 100 million users. It took 9 months to get from 400 million to 500 million.

Over that those six months, the biggest change to Instagram has been the introduction of Stories, which were almost identical to Snapchat’s, not to mention disappearing photos and videos in direct messages. It was an easy way to capture Snapchat’s younger audience, and it appears to have paid off.

But Instagram has also been adding other new features – like live video and post bookmarks – more quickly than ever. Whatever the reason for its growth. clearly it’s doing something right.

It’s another showcase of Facebook’s dominance over social media. WhatsApp had 1 billion monthly active users as of February, Messenger had 1 billion as of July, while Facebook proper has over 1.79 billion since September.