Multiple sources reported this morning that roughly one quarter of Instagram users had quit the site in response to the controversy surrounding the site’s attempt to make broad changes to its privacy policy, including claiming ownership over any photo posted to the service.
As Chris in Paris put it to me by email:
In addition to the poor decision to take over ownership of photos (that has since been reverted back to the original policy) it’s hard not to dismiss the loss of customers to the Facebook purchase. Hipsters and early movers are less likely to want to use a product that is owned by a giant like Facebook, as opposed to an independent company. Also, after a few thousand photos that look like Polaroid photos, how interesting can it still be?
Whatever it was that caused the problems today for Facebook, they’re learning the hard way that bad decisions come with a cost.
Quite right: Facebook’s share price was down by over three percent at one point today.
But as Chris also noted to me, there’s some disagreement as to whether a mass exodus from Instagram is actually place. Business Insider has a helpful explanation of what’s going on regarding Instagram’s user traffic:
The [original New York Post] story cites AppData, which tracks usage of Facebook applications like FarmVille. Some users have connected their Instagram and Facebook accounts in a way that would show up in AppData’s metrics, but most have not. So when the Post says, “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,” it’s only talking about a subset of Instagram users.
…the drop in active daily users of Instagram’s application on Facebook occurred between Dec. 23 and Dec. 25, according to AppData. (Look for yourself!) Instagram released its new terms of use on Dec. 17, igniting controversy almost immediately, but AppData doesn’t show any significant decline in usage until Christmas.
