Like Facebook, people aren’t sharing to Instagram as much anymore

In a report from The Information:

Between 2013 and 2015, the number of photos shared on average by each Instagram user fell, said two people briefed on the app’s internal data.

Facebook already has a real sharing problem with their own platform, and now the app that cost the company US$1 billion is facing similar declines.

Since Facebook’s Instagram purchase in 2012 the company has barely touched Instagram. 2016 has so far been a notably big year for the social network though, with Facebook replacing the reverse-chronological Instagram feed with an algorithmic feed, while also reskinning the app, perhaps in response to this reported sharing decline.

As far as I’m concerned Instagram itself feels like a product from a different era, especially considering the rise of Snapchat. The ‘gram was the original big mobile-first social network, but Snapchat’s simple camera-first UI means that, in terms of frictionless sharing, Snapchat has the upper hand.

While Instagram has allowed their product to stagnate, Snapchat has turned their app into an alternate camera app, one which only requires a single touch to share with specific friends rather than a public or private group of friends.

Even worse for Facebook, the Snapchat My Story feature can specifically replicate a lot of Instagram’s functionality, with fun filters and face-swapping tweaks.

With more celebrities sharing daily My Story’s, including the queen herself Kim Kardashian, Instagram has slowly turned into a much slower, more traditional space for glossy images rather than the place for fast and scrappy shots.

It’ll be interesting to see how Facebook will react to this decline.