Facebook’s photo-sharing app Instagram is posting numbers that suggest its own picture is back in focus these days.
A month after it had a PR nightmare over its terms of service, it is reporting that it has 90 million monthly active users. Instagram also says its users upload to the social network 40 million photos per day. What’s more, every second they like 8,500 of the filter-enhanced snap shots and make 1,000 comments about them.
The stats are good news following the kerfuffle that erupted last month when Instagram had to do some back-peddling after it released an unpopular update to its terms of service.
At issue were concerns over whether Instagram would sell your photos to be used in advertisements without your permission or compensation, as the policy seemed to indicate. High-profile Instagram users had threatened to abandon the site and many users exported their photos and deleted their accounts.
Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom responded by changing the advertising section of the terms of service to the original version.
“Going forward, rather than obtain permission from you to introduce possible advertising products we have not yet developed, we are going to take the time to complete our plans, and then come back to our users and explain how we would like for our advertising business to work.” he wrote in a blog post.
According to Instagram’s latest tally, plenty of people stuck around, although timing is everything with these kinds of announcements. Instagram’s new terms of service originally were supposed to go into effect Jan. 16, but after all the hubbub and the company’s subsequent reversal, the date was pushed out to Jan. 19.
“You can read our blog post that highlights some of the key updates,” Instagram said in an email last week. “And remember, these updates don’t change the fact that you own your photos that you post on Instagram, and our privacy controls work just as they did before.
Tallying the number of people who use an app is complicated business .
While Instagram said last September it had 100 million users, those numbers represented how many people were registered on the platform. The new numbers — monthly active users — is a different animal, and one that’s more meaningful.