Instagram overtook TikTok in new app downloads last year, with the US photo-sharing platform's growth fueled by imitating its Chinese rival's success with short-form videos.
The total number of Instagram app downloads rose 20 percent 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, which is owned by Beijing-based ByteDance, rose just 4 percent to 733 million over the same period.
Statistics show that Meta's photo-sharing platform has had success targeting new users, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg identifying TikTok's growth as among the biggest threats to his social media empire.
In 2020, Instagram introduced “reels,” a feature that allows users to share short clips, replicating TikTok's viral video features that attracted millions of Gen Z consumers.
“Instagram has outpaced TikTok in terms of adoption over the past few years, driven by the popularity of its reels feature alongside legacy social media features and functionality,” said Abraham Youssef, senior insights director at Sensor Tower.
There are also signs that TikTok's growth has begun to stabilize for the first time since its launch in 2016.
The number of monthly active users on Instagram has reached 1.47 billion, with a rise of 13 million in the fourth quarter of 2023, according to Sensor Tower. TikTok has reached 1.12 billion active users, down 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.
Instagram has successfully kept existing users on its app by pushing it into short-form videos, meaning that for “the next batch of potential TikTok users, there is no incentive to switch,” said Mark Shmulik, an analyst at Bernstein.
He added that influencers are increasingly drawn to Instagram. For those creators, Shmulik said TikTok was a better place to achieve overnight viral success, while its U.S. competitor was a better platform for making money from a follower base.
While TikTok has grown rapidly thanks to its algorithm that offers users clips targeted to their preferences along with other viral content, Meta last year poured investment into artificial intelligence to boost its recommendation system.
Meta's chief financial officer, Susan Lee, said last month that Instagram was “making strong progress in increasing the freshness of recommended content.”
Instagram also took advantage of ByteDance's policy of allowing users to download watermarked TikTok videos that they can share on various social media platforms, which was originally designed to boost the visibility of the Chinese-owned app.
One area of ByteDance's growing success is e-commerce thanks to the TikTok Store, which enables brands and merchants to sell merchandise marketed through short videos.
Sensor Tower estimates that ByteDance generated 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 United States, which is the total value of goods sold on its platform, according to internal TikTok financial statistics seen by the Financial Times. So far, in 2024, this company has already generated more than $500 million in total gross value in the United States.
Meta and TikTok did not respond to requests for comment.
Additional reporting by Andy Lin in Hong Kong and Hannah Murphy in San Francisco
