Photo sharing social network, Instagram, had a record breaking Thanksgiving this year as the site’s users shared 10 million photos in the US. The peak traffic on the site was at 12:40PM PST when 226 images per second were being shared. Almost 200 photos were being posted every second for several hours on November 22 and broke every record in the Instagram book. The Facebook owned mobile photo sharing service stated that the site experienced a doubling of site activity during Thanksgiving.
The jump is quite significant for Instagram which gets over 5 million photos shared on a normal day. Although impressive, this is no were close to its parent company Facebook which gets 300 million uploaded images per day.
Instagram was started in 2010 and the current growth shows its success among users. The site commented on the Thanksgiving Day activity and said that, “We’re thrilled to see people use Instagram to share their holidays. Whether celebrating with friends and family or sharing photos with them halfway across the globe, we’re excited to see the intimacy and immediacy of the Instagram experience bring us all closer together over this holiday season.”
Facebook bought the startup in April 2012 but did not start integrating the site into its ecosystem until September of this year. This might have been done deliberately to coincide with the site passing a major milestone with 5 billion photo uploads. The Facebook bump helped the site reach 100 million users after being officially bought by Facebook and it is currently on route to hit the 200 million user milestone.
As time goes on the two social networks will start to integrate even further. Right now Instagram is redesigning profile pages to resemble Facebook pages and the parent company will soon test ways to monetize the photo-sharing site and make use of its huge potential.
Source: The Next Web