It has been a bad month for Facebook's Instagram. After being the center of a fierce uproar over its proposed terms and conditions updates, the service has seen its number of daily users drop by 50 percent.
That is an outrageous decline. According to AppStats, 7.41 million users were uploading daily content onto Instagram on the day ending Jan. 14. That's down from over 16 million in Dec. 2012. The numbers haven't been confirmed by Facebook or Instagram, but they signal a continuing trend of users fleeing what they might feel is an untrustworthy company.
"The main loss will be most likely due to the terms of service changes, given how much attention and controversy the terms of service change has brought, and seeing how clearly the Instagram app dropped after the terms of service change," said AppStats CEO Sebastian Sujka to the New York Post.
This whole ordeal began when Instagram attempted to monetize the service by changing its terms and conditions. The section that sparked the outrage is below:
"Instagram does not claim ownership of any content that you post on or through the service. Instead, you hereby grant to Instagram a non-exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, worldwide license to use the content that you post on or through the service."
The photo-sharing service attempted to spin the update as a means to fight off spam more efficiently and easily incorporate Facebook sharing, but the explanation failed to placate those who looked further into the terms. What they found seemed to be an ulterior motive: Instagram wanted to bring in advertising revenue by selling users' photos and using them in ads.
After a few days of public hand-wringing, Instagram tried to clear up confusion by saying it had no intention of selling users' photos, but by then anger had spread. The company reverted back to the original terms of service, hoping to staunch the bleeding.
If AppStats' numbers, are accurate, though, Instagram still has a long way to go before people decide to embrace it again.
