International Business: Is it Instagram’s turn next?: Estimates show Instagram’s growth in monthly users to fall – Gulf Digital News

International Business: Is it Instagram’s turn next?: Estimates show Instagram’s growth in monthly users to fall – Gulf Digital News

LOS ANGELES: TikTok, the pandemic and mobile data costs in India all helped draw people away from Facebook at an unprecedented rate last quarter. The big question is when will it be Instagram’s turn?

One forecaster, Insider Intelligence, does not expect Meta Platforms’s Instagram social media service to lose users in the next three years. But its November estimates show Instagram’s growth in monthly users will fall to 5.8 per cent this year and 3.1pc by 2025 from 16.5pc last year.

Instagram, which the tech giant acquired in 2012 for $1 billion, has been viewed as an antidote to slowing growth at Facebook, with revenue from adverts on Instagram increasingly crucial to Meta.

The company is putting those funds toward building out a new business selling virtual-reality goggles and related metaverse technologies. A decline in Instagram users and inability to raise advert prices could halt Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg’s ambitions.

Fewer people checked their Facebook every day per quarter than they did the year before for the first time ever during the last three months of 2021, Meta said. It was one of several troubling signs, along with profit below expectations and a disappointing revenue outlook, that dropped shares over 26pc on