In 2021, there were 1.21 billion monthly active users of Meta's Instagram, making up over 28 percent of the world's internet users. By 2025, it has been forecast that there will be 1.44 billion monthly active users of the social media platform, which would account for 31.2 percent of global internet users.

How popular is Instagram?

Instagram, as of January 2022, was the fourth most popular social media platform in the world in terms of user numbers. YouTube and WhatsApp ranked in second and third place, respectively, whilst Facebook remained the most popular, with almost three billion monthly active users worldwide.

India had the largest number of Instagram users as of January 2022, with a total of over 230 million users in the country. The second-largest Instagram audience could be found in the United States, with almost 160 million people subscribing to the photo and video sharing app.

Gen Z and Instagram

As of September 2021, Gen Z users in the United States spent an average of five hours per week on Instagram. Although Instagram ranked third in terms of hours per week spent on the platform, Gen Z users spent considerably more time on TikTok, amounting to a weekly average of over 10 hours being spent on the mobile-first video app.

Most followed accounts on Instagram

As of May 2022, Instagram’s own account had 504.37 million followers. In terms of celebrities, Portuguese footballer Cristiano Ronaldo (@chistiano) had over 440.41 million followers on the social network. Moreover, the average media value of an Instagram post by Ronaldo was over 985,000 U.S. dollars.

The most liked post on Instagram as of May 2022 was Photo of an Egg, which was posted in 2019 by the account @world_record_egg. Photo of an Egg has not only exceeded 55 million likes on the platform, but it also has nearly 3.5 million comments, and the account itself has over 4.5 million Instagram followers. After mysterious posts published by the account, World Record Egg revealed itself as part of a mental health campaign aimed at the difficulties and demands of using social media.

Use our Instagram dataset (public data) to extract business and non-business information from complete public profiles and filter by hashtags, followers, account type, or engagement score. Depending on your needs, you may purchase the entire dataset or a customized subset. Popular use cases include sentiment analysis, brand monitoring, influencer marketing, and more. The dataset includes all major data points: # of followers, verified status, account type (business / non-business), links, posts, comments, location, engagement score, hashtags, and much more.

Cristiano Ronaldo has one of the most popular Instagram accounts as of April 2024.

              The Portuguese footballer is the most-followed person on the photo sharing app platform with 628 million followers. Instagram's own account was ranked first with roughly 672 million followers.

              How popular is Instagram?

              Instagram is a photo-sharing social networking service that enables users to take pictures and edit them with filters. The platform allows users to post and share their images online and directly with their friends and followers on the social network. The cross-platform app reached one billion monthly active users in mid-2018. In 2020, there were over 114 million Instagram users in the United States and experts project this figure to surpass 127 million users in 2023.

              Who uses Instagram?

              Instagram audiences are predominantly young – recent data states that almost 60 percent of U.S. Instagram users are aged 34 years or younger. Fall 2020 data reveals that Instagram is also one of the most popular social media for teens and one of the social networks with the biggest reach among teens in the United States.

              Celebrity influencers on Instagram
              Many celebrities and athletes are brand spokespeople and generate additional income with social media advertising and sponsored content. Unsurprisingly, Ronaldo ranked first again, as the average media value of one of his Instagram posts was 985,441 U.S. dollars.

Instagram data-download example dataset

In this repository you can find a data-set consisting of 11 personal Instagram archives, or Data-Download Packages (DDPs).

How the data was generated

These Instagram accounts were all new and generated by a group of researchers who were interested to figure out in detail the structure and variety in structure of these Instagram DDPs. The participants user the Instagram account extensively for approximately a week. The participants also intensively communicated with each other so that the data can be used as an example of a network.

The data was primarily generated to evaluate the performance of de-identification software. Therefore, the text in the DDPs particularly contain many randomly chosen (Dutch) first names, phone numbers, e-mail addresses and URLS. In addition, the images in the DDPs contain many faces and text as well. The DDPs contain faces and text (usernames) of third parties. However, only content of so-called `professional accounts' are shared, such as accounts of famous individuals or institutions who self-consciously and actively seek publicity, and these sources are easily publicly available. Furthermore, the DDPs do not contain sensitive personal data of these individuals.

Obtaining your Instagram DDP

After using the Instagram accounts intensively for approximately a week, the participants requested their personal Instagram DDPs by using the following steps. You can follow these steps yourself if you are interested in your personal Instagram DDP.

1. Go to www.instagram.com and log in
2. Click on your profile picture, go to Settings and Privacy and Security
3. Scroll to Data download and click Request download
4. Enter your email adress and click Next
5. Enter your password and click Request download

Instagram then delivered the data in a compressed zip folder with the format username_YYYYMMDD.zip (i.e., Instagram handle and date of download) to the participant, and the participants shared these DDPs with us.

Data cleaning

To comply with the Instagram user agreement, participants shared their full name, phone number and e-mail address. In addition, Instagram logged the i.p. addresses the participant used during their active period on Instagram. After colleting the DDPs, we manually replaced such information with random replacements such that the DDps shared here do not contain any personal data of the participants.

How this data-set can be used

This data-set was generated with the intention to evaluate the performance of the de-identification software. We invite other researchers to use this data-set for example to investigate what type of data can be found in Instagram DDPs or to investigate the structure of Instagram DDPs. The packages can also be used for example data-analyses, although no substantive research questions can be answered using this data as the data does not reflect how research subjects behave `in the wild'.

Authors

The data collection is executed by Laura Boeschoten, Ruben van den Goorbergh and Daniel Oberski of Utrecht University. For questions, please contact l.boeschoten@uu.nl.

Acknowledgments

The researchers would like to thank everyone who participated in this data-generation project.

As of April 2024, almost 32 percent of global Instagram audiences were aged between 18 and 24 years, and 30.6 percent of users were aged between 25 and 34 years. Overall, 16 percent of users belonged to the 35 to 44 year age group.

              Instagram users

              With roughly one billion monthly active users, Instagram belongs to the most popular social networks worldwide. The social photo sharing app is especially popular in India and in the United States, which have respectively 362.9 million and 169.7 million Instagram users each.

              Instagram features

              One of the most popular features of Instagram is Stories. Users can post photos and videos to their Stories stream and the content is live for others to view for 24 hours before it disappears. In January 2019, the company reported that there were 500 million daily active Instagram Stories users. Instagram Stories directly competes with Snapchat, another photo sharing app that initially became famous due to it’s “vanishing photos” feature.
              As of the second quarter of 2021, Snapchat had 293 million daily active users.

Kindly refer to my paper for more information. Please cite my work if you use my dataset in any work : K. R. Purba, D. Asirvatham and R. K. Murugesan, "Classification of instagram fake users using supervised machine learning algorithms," International Journal of Electrical and Computer Engineering (IJECE), vol. 10, no. 3, pp. 2763-2772, 2020.

The dataset was collected using web scraping from third-party Instagram websites, to capture their metadata and up to 12 latest media posts from each user. The collection process was executed from September 1st, 2019, until September 20th, 2019. The dataset contains authentic users and fake users, which were filtered using human annotators. The authentic users were taken from followers of 24 private university pages (8 Indonesian, 8 Malaysian, 8 Australian) on Instagram. To reduce the number of users, they are picked using proportional random sampling based on their source university. All private users were removed, which is a total of 31,335 out of 63,795 users (49.11%). The final number of public users used in this research was 32,460 users.

Var name | Feature name | Description pos | Num posts | Number of total posts that the user has ever posted. flg | Num following | Number of following flr | Num followers | Number of followers bl | Biography length | Length (number of characters) of the user's biography pic | Picture availability | Value 0 if the user has no profile picture, or 1 if has lin | Link availability | Value 0 if the user has no external URL, or 1 if has cl | Average caption length | The average number of character of captions in media cz | Caption zero | Percentage (0.0 to 1.0) of captions that has almost zero (<=3) length ni | Non image percentage | Percentage (0.0 to 1.0) of non-image media. There are three types of media on an Instagram post, i.e. image, video, carousel erl | Engagement rate (Like) | Engagement rate (ER) is commonly defined as (num likes) divide by (num media) divide by (num followers) erc | Engagement rate (Comm.) | Similar to ER like, but it is for comments lt | Location tag percentage | Percentage (0.0 to 1.0) of posts tagged with location hc | Average hashtag count | Average number of hashtags used in a post pr | Promotional keywords | Average use of promotional keywords in hashtag, i.e. {regrann, contest, repost, giveaway, mention, share, give away, quiz} fo | Followers keywords | Average use of followers hunter keywords in hashtag, i.e. {follow, like, folback, follback, f4f} cs | Cosine similarity | Average cosine similarity of between all pair of two posts a user has pi | Post interval | Average interval between posts (in hours)

Output : 2-class User classes : r (real/authentic user), f (fake user / bought followers) 4-class User classes : r (authentic/real user), a (active fake user), i (inactive fake user), s (spammer fake user) Note that the 3 fake user classes (a, i, s) were judged by human annotators.

As of April 2024, around 16.5 percent of global active Instagram users were men between the ages of 18 and 24 years. More than half of the global Instagram population worldwide was aged 34 years or younger.

              Teens and social media

              As one of the biggest social networks worldwide, Instagram is especially popular with teenagers. As of fall 2020, the photo-sharing app ranked third in terms of preferred social network among teenagers in the United States, second to Snapchat and TikTok. Instagram was one of the most influential advertising channels among female Gen Z users when making purchasing decisions. Teens report feeling more confident, popular, and better about themselves when using social media, and less lonely, depressed and anxious.
              Social media can have negative effects on teens, which is also much more pronounced on those with low emotional well-being. It was found that 35 percent of teenagers with low social-emotional well-being reported to have experienced cyber bullying when using social media, while in comparison only five percent of teenagers with high social-emotional well-being stated the same. As such, social media can have a big impact on already fragile states of mind.

Context

Worldwide Social Media User in 2021 (Quarterly)

Acknowledgements

Facebook: https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/ Twitter: https://investor.twitterinc.com/home/default.aspx Instagram: https://investor.fb.com/home/default.aspx

Context: This dataset offers insights into the usage patterns of social media apps for 1,000 users across seven popular platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. It tracks various metrics such as daily time spent on the app, number of posts made, likes received, and new followers gained.

Dataset Features:

User_ID: Unique identifier for each user. App: The social media platform being used. Daily_Minutes_Spent: Total time a user spends on the app each day, ranging from 5 to 500 minutes. Posts_Per_Day: Number of posts a user creates per day, ranging from 0 to 20. Likes_Per_Day: Total number of likes a user receives on their posts each day, ranging from 0 to 200. Follows_Per_Day: The number of new followers a user gains daily, ranging from 0 to 50. Context & Use Cases: This dataset could be particularly useful for social media analysts, digital marketers, or researchers interested in understanding user engagement trends across different platforms. It provides insights into how much time users spend, how actively they post, and the level of engagement they receive (in terms of likes and followers).

Conclusion & Outcome: Analyzing this dataset could yield several outcomes:

Engagement Patterns: Identifying which platforms have higher engagement in terms of time spent or likes received. Active Users: Determining which users are the most active across various platforms based on the number of posts and followers gained. User Retention: Studying the correlation between time spent and follower growth, providing insight into user retention strategies for different platforms. Overall, the dataset allows for exploration of social media usage trends and helps drive decision-making for marketing strategies, content creation, and platform engagement.

As of January 2024, Instagram was slightly more popular with men than women, with men accounting for 50.6 percent of the platform’s global users. Additionally, the social media app was most popular amongst younger audiences, with almost 32 percent of users aged between 18 and 24 years.

              Instagram’s Global Audience

              As of January 2024, Instagram was the fourth most popular social media platform globally, reaching two billion monthly active users (MAU). This number is projected to keep growing with no signs of slowing down, which is not a surprise as the global online social penetration rate across all regions is constantly increasing.
              As of January 2024, the country with the largest Instagram audience was India with 362.9 million users, followed by the United States with 169.7 million users.

              Who is winning over the generations?

              Even though Instagram’s audience is almost twice the size of TikTok’s on a global scale, TikTok has shown itself to be a fierce competitor, particularly amongst younger audiences. TikTok was the most downloaded mobile app globally in 2022, generating 672 million downloads. As of 2022, Generation Z in the United States spent more time on TikTok than on Instagram monthly.

This table includes platform data for Facebook participants in the Deactivation experiment. Each row of the dataset corresponds to data from a participant’s Facebook user account. Each column contains a value, or set of values, that aggregates log data for this specific participant over a certain period of time.

Instagram’s most popular post

              As of April 2024, the most popular post on Instagram was Lionel Messi and his teammates after winning the 2022 FIFA World Cup with Argentina, posted by the account @leomessi. Messi's post, which racked up over 61 million likes within a day, knocked off the reigning post, which was 'Photo of an Egg'. Originally posted in January 2021, 'Photo of an Egg' surpassed the world’s most popular Instagram post at that time, which was a photo by Kylie Jenner’s daughter totaling 18 million likes.
              After several cryptic posts published by the account, World Record Egg revealed itself to be a part of a mental health campaign aimed at the pressures of social media use.

              Instagram’s most popular accounts

              As of April 2024, the official Instagram account @instagram had the most followers of any account on the platform, with 672 million followers. Portuguese footballer Cristiano Ronaldo (@cristiano) was the most followed individual with 628 million followers, while Selena Gomez (@selenagomez) was the most followed woman on the platform with 429 million. Additionally, Inter Miami CF striker Lionel Messi (@leomessi) had a total of 502 million. Celebrities such as The Rock, Kylie Jenner, and Ariana Grande all had over 380 million followers each.

              Instagram influencers

              In the United States, the leading content category of Instagram influencers was lifestyle, with 15.25 percent of influencers creating lifestyle content in 2021. Music ranked in second place with 10.96 percent, followed by family with 8.24 percent. Having a large audience can be very lucrative: Instagram influencers in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom with over 90,000 followers made around 1,221 US dollars per post.

              Instagram around the globe

              Instagram’s worldwide popularity continues to grow, and India is the leading country in terms of number of users, with over 362.9 million users as of January 2024. The United States had 169.65 million Instagram users and Brazil had 134.6 million users. The social media platform was also very popular in Indonesia and Turkey, with 100.9 and 57.1, respectively. As of January 2024, Instagram was the fourth most popular social network in the world, behind Facebook, YouTube and WhatsApp.

This dataset contains information on application install interactions of users in the Myket android application market. The dataset was created for the purpose of evaluating interaction prediction models, requiring user and item identifiers along with timestamps of the interactions. Hence, the dataset can be used for interaction prediction and building a recommendation system. Furthermore, the data forms a dynamic network of interactions, and we can also perform network representation learning on the nodes in the network, which are users and applications.

Data Creation The dataset was initially generated by the Myket data team, and later cleaned and subsampled by Erfan Loghmani a master student at Sharif University of Technology at the time. The data team focused on a two-week period and randomly sampled 1/3 of the users with interactions during that period. They then selected install and update interactions for three months before and after the two-week period, resulting in interactions spanning about 6 months and two weeks.

We further subsampled and cleaned the data to focus on application download interactions. We identified the top 8000 most installed applications and selected interactions related to them. We retained users with more than 32 interactions, resulting in 280,391 users. From this group, we randomly selected 10,000 users, and the data was filtered to include only interactions for these users. The detailed procedure can be found in here.

Data Structure The dataset has two main files.

myket.csv: This file contains the interaction information and follows the same format as the datasets used in the "JODIE: Predicting Dynamic Embedding Trajectory in Temporal Interaction Networks" (ACM SIGKDD 2019) project. However, this data does not contain state labels and interaction features, resulting in associated columns being all zero. app_info_sample.csv: This file comprises features associated with applications present in the sample. For each individual application, information such as the approximate number of installs, average rating, count of ratings, and category are included. These features provide insights into the applications present in the dataset.

Dataset Details

Total Instances: 694,121 install interaction instances Instances Format: Triplets of user_id, app_name, timestamp 10,000 users and 7,988 android applications Item features for 7,606 applications

For a detailed summary of the data's statistics, including information on users, applications, and interactions, please refer to the Python notebook available at summary-stats.ipynb. The notebook provides an overview of the dataset's characteristics and can be helpful for understanding the data's structure before using it for research or analysis.

Top 20 Most Installed Applications | Package Name | Count of Interactions | | ---------------------------------- | --------------------- | | com.instagram.android | 15292 | | ir.resaneh1.iptv | 12143 | | com.tencent.ig | 7919 | | com.ForgeGames.SpecialForcesGroup2 | 7797 | | ir.nomogame.ClutchGame | 6193 | | com.dts.freefireth | 6041 | | com.whatsapp | 5876 | | com.supercell.clashofclans | 5817 | | com.mojang.minecraftpe | 5649 | | com.lenovo.anyshare.gps | 5076 | | ir.medu.shad | 4673 | | com.firsttouchgames.dls3 | 4641 | | com.activision.callofduty.shooter | 4357 | | com.tencent.iglite | 4126 | | com.aparat | 3598 | | com.kiloo.subwaysurf | 3135 | | com.supercell.clashroyale | 2793 | | co.palang.QuizOfKings | 2589 | | com.nazdika.app | 2436 | | com.digikala | 2413 |

Comparison with SNAP Datasets The Myket dataset introduced in this repository exhibits distinct characteristics compared to the real-world datasets used by the project. The table below provides a comparative overview of the key dataset characteristics:

The Myket dataset stands out by having an ample number of both users and items, highlighting its relevance for real-world, large-scale applications. Unlike LastFM, Reddit, and Wikipedia datasets, where users exhibit repetitive item interactions, the Myket dataset contains a comparatively lower amount of repetitive interactions. This unique characteristic reflects the diverse nature of user behaviors in the Android application market environment.

Citation If you use this dataset in your research, please cite the following preprint:

@misc{loghmani2023effect, title={Effect of Choosing Loss Function when Using T-batching for Representation Learning on Dynamic Networks}, author={Erfan Loghmani and MohammadAmin Fazli}, year={2023}, eprint={2308.06862}, archivePrefix={arXiv}, primaryClass={cs.LG} }

Includes two datasets published for the detection of fake and automated accounts.

The number of Instagram users in the United Kingdom was forecast to continuously increase between 2024 and 2028 by in total 2.1 million users (+7.02 percent). After the ninth consecutive increasing year, the Instagram user base is estimated to reach 32 million users and therefore a new peak in 2028. Notably, the number of Instagram users of was continuously increasing over the past years.User figures, shown here with regards to the platform instagram, have been estimated by taking into account company filings or press material, secondary research, app downloads and traffic data. They refer to the average monthly active users over the period and count multiple accounts by persons only once.The shown data are an excerpt of Statista's Key Market Indicators (KMI). The KMI are a collection of primary and secondary indicators on the macro-economic, demographic and technological environment in up to 150 countries and regions worldwide. All indicators are sourced from international and national statistical offices, trade associations and the trade press and they are processed to generate comparable data sets (see supplementary notes under details for more information).

The number of Instagram users in Indonesia was forecast to continuously increase between 2024 and 2028 by in total 5.3 million users (+4.25 percent). After the ninth consecutive increasing year, the Instagram user base is estimated to reach 129.83 million users and therefore a new peak in 2028. Notably, the number of Instagram users of was continuously increasing over the past years.User figures, shown here with regards to the platform instagram, have been estimated by taking into account company filings or press material, secondary research, app downloads and traffic data. They refer to the average monthly active users over the period and count multiple accounts by persons only once.The shown data are an excerpt of Statista's Key Market Indicators (KMI). The KMI are a collection of primary and secondary indicators on the macro-economic, demographic and technological environment in up to 150 countries and regions worldwide. All indicators are sourced from international and national statistical offices, trade associations and the trade press and they are processed to generate comparable data sets (see supplementary notes under details for more information).Find more key insights for the number of Instagram users in countries like Philippines and Thailand.

As of January 2024, #love was the most used hashtag on Instagram, being included in over two billion posts on the social media platform. #Instagood and #instagram were used over one billion times as of early 2024.

As of April 2024, Bahrain was the country with the highest Instagram audience reach with 95.6 percent. Kazakhstan also had a high Instagram audience penetration rate, with 90.8 percent of the population using the social network. In the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, and Brunei, the photo-sharing platform was used by more than 85 percent of each country's population.

The number of Twitter users in the United States was forecast to continuously increase between 2024 and 2028 by in total 4.3 million users (+5.32 percent). After the ninth consecutive increasing year, the Twitter user base is estimated to reach 85.08 million users and therefore a new peak in 2028. Notably, the number of Twitter users of was continuously increasing over the past years.User figures, shown here regarding the platform twitter, have been estimated by taking into account company filings or press material, secondary research, app downloads and traffic data. They refer to the average monthly active users over the period.The shown data are an excerpt of Statista's Key Market Indicators (KMI). The KMI are a collection of primary and secondary indicators on the macro-economic, demographic and technological environment in up to 150 countries and regions worldwide. All indicators are sourced from international and national statistical offices, trade associations and the trade press and they are processed to generate comparable data sets (see supplementary notes under details for more information).Find more key insights for the number of Twitter users in countries like Canada and Mexico.

The number of Instagram users in Central & Western Europe was forecast to increase between 2024 and 2028 by in total 4.5 million users (+3.52 percent). This overall increase does not happen continuously, notably not in 2028. The Instagram user base is estimated to amount to 132.21 million users in 2028. Notably, the number of Instagram users of was continuously increasing over the past years.User figures, shown here with regards to the platform instagram, have been estimated by taking into account company filings or press material, secondary research, app downloads and traffic data. They refer to the average monthly active users over the period and count multiple accounts by persons only once.The shown data are an excerpt of Statista's Key Market Indicators (KMI). The KMI are a collection of primary and secondary indicators on the macro-economic, demographic and technological environment in up to 150 countries and regions worldwide. All indicators are sourced from international and national statistical offices, trade associations and the trade press and they are processed to generate comparable data sets (see supplementary notes under details for more information).Find more key insights for the number of Instagram users in countries like Eastern Europe and Northern Europe.