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Instagram hit 300 million active users on Wednesday, a total that puts the service in rare company as one of the world’s largest social networks.
So how, exactly, does Instagram stack up?
There is no perfect measuring stick when it comes to comparing the size of social network-like services, but there is a generally accepted standard: Monthly Active Users. That is, the number of people who log into their account during any given month.
The MAU yardstick is used by all the major players — Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp — and while it helps create a baseline, some platforms would argue that active users don’t paint the whole picture.
Twitter, for example, is pushing hard to convince Wall Street that tweets from the platform reach an audience much, much larger than the one that has user profiles. Pinterest talks about total pins — don’t mind our total user count, look at how busy those users actually are.
Alternatively, Snapchat doesn’t share any user data, and Google+ hasn’t shared a new user number in more than a year (so we excluded them from the list). And LinkedIn shares total profiles created, not necessarily active profiles.
But for the sake of putting Instagram’s size into perspective, we’re prepared to compare active user bases — whether they like it or not. Here’s where everyone stands.
Update: We removed LinkedIn from the graph so that all companies shown are measured by the same MAU metric.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
