Instagram users have flocked to the service’s new video-sharing capacity, sharing more than 5 million videos in the first 24 hours.
The first eight hours’ worth of clips, each of which lasts 15 seconds at most, would take a year to watch, a company spokesperson told CNET. By comparison, it would take over 16 years to watch all the video uploaded to YouTube in the same time frame.
It’ll go down in the books as a successful launch for Instagram and parent company Facebook, despite the troubles some users (including myself) are having in actually viewing videos in the app and elsewhere. Currently, the community is sharing 45 million photos a day. To have a ninth as many videos shared in one day is a strong showing.
At the peak of the first day’s activity, just as Miami Heat beat San Antonio Spurs to lock up the NBA title, users were sharing 40 hours of video a minute.
It’ll be interesting to see how popular videos remain on Instagram going forward, especially considering that some longtime users feel the service is “corrupting the experience by mingling the two elements” of photos and videos in a single feed.
Illustration by Fernando Alfonso III
