A report out this morning suggests that Instagram may have lost a quarter of its users following the news of its ridiculous new Terms of Service agreement, in which the company essentially stated that it would sell your photos for profit without your permission.
The app, which Facebook acquired for $1 billion earlier this year, may have shed nearly a quarter of its daily active users in the wake of the debacle, according to figures from AppData.
“[We are] pretty sure the decline in Instagram users was due to the terms of service announcement” on Dec. 17, AppData told The Post.
Instagram, which peaked at 16.4 million active daily users the week it rolled out its policy change, had fallen to 12.4 million as of yesterday, according to the data.
However, some people think the dropoff has a lot to do with the Holidays, a time people often put aside their gadgets and go offline. But I suppose there’s an argument to made that people play around with gadgets more during the Holidays because they a) receive new ones as gifts and b) they have more free time to play around with them. People who normally use Instagram may also be trying out other photo-sharing services like SnapChat and Flickr.
So how screwed is Instagram? Probably a little screwed, but not as screwed as the report from earlier today made it seem. In other words, about as screwed as this dog’s owner is. It looks a lot worse than it actually is.