Facebook's Instagram overtakes Twitter hitting 300-mn user mark

Facebook-owned photo-sharing service Instagram has shot past the 300-million user mark, the company said in a blog post today.     

The four-year-old service also appeared to have left behind micro-blogging service Twitter, which counts 284 million monthly active users.

Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom also revealed features that would keep authentic accounts from fake or spammy ones.

"We're proud to announce that there are now more than 300 million Instagrammers. Over the past four years, what began as two friends with a dream has grown into a global community that shares more than 70 million photos and videos each day," Systrom said in a blog post.

He said Instagram is now "home to creativity in all of its forms," where one can find "everything from images of the Nile River to the newest look from Herschel Supply or a peek inside the mind of Taylor Swift."

Systrom added that as Instagram continued to grow, it rolled out features that would help members find new photos and videos about people they cared for.

He went on to add that as the service got bigger, it had to find ways to differentiate between real celebrities and fakes.

Facebook spent $1 billion on the photo blogging service in 2012 and had seen the site grow into one of the few social destinations that boasted hundreds of millions of users around the globe - though its revenue had not been revealed, New York Post reported.

New York Post quoted Barclays Capital tech analyst Anthony DiClemente as saying, it had roughly doubled from 150 million in September 2013, meaning not only was Instagram now larger than Twitter - 284 million monthly active users as of 30 September, but it was also growing its user base faster than Twitter.

According to Barclays' calculations, Instagram was up 22 per cent per year over year for the third quarter.

Instagram said 70 per cent of its traffic came from outside of the US, which translated to around 90 million US users, versus around 63 million domestic users for Twitter, according to Barclays.

Meanwhile, according to eMarketer, Instagrams' US growth rate would slow next year to 14.8 per cent and the projected domestic monthly active users would be 60.3 million.