While Meta does report its quarterly performance updates, which indicate the overall numbers of users that it has on Facebook, and across its "Family of Apps" (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger), it's pretty challenging to get more detailed statistics about each of its app's standalone performance numbers at any given time, since Meta only reports on key milestones and events.

So we know for Facebook, 3.065 billion log onto the app each month, but we do not know how many use IG in isolation.

The last update Meta had been giving us on Instagram usage was in 2022, when the company had announced it reached 2 billion monthly active users. The last update before that was in 2018, when IG hit a billion actives.

So, as you can see, pretty inconsistent reporting.

But last week, we finally caught a whiff of Instagram's revenue performance numbers in standalone figures, as part of Meta's latest legal filing to dismiss the FTC's antitrust lawsuit, which looks to require Meta to sell off Instagram and WhatsApp.

According to the filings, Instagram took in:

$11.3 billion in ad revenue in 2018
$17.9 billion in 2019
$22 billion in 2020
$32.4 billion in 2021
The filing adds also that IG earned $16.5 billion in ad revenue during the first six months of last year, giving it a chance of over $33 billion for the calendar year, based on holiday spend being higher.
That is a tremendous sum of money.

According to Bloomberg, the figures indicate that Instagram accounts for about 30% of Meta's overall revenue in 2022. Using the same to extrapolate to last year's numbers, it means that IG fetched around $40 billion as ad revenue in 2023.

Not bad for an app that Meta acquired for $1 billion back in 2012.

As for user growth, some light has just been shed on the new E.U. rule: Meta will have to report its E.U. user counts quarterly.
We are aware that as of September 2023, IG had 259 million monthly active users in Europe.
So, using this, along with the officially reported 2 billion users, it can be estimated, referring to Facebook's user spread as a proxy, that IG probably has around 175 million users in the U.S., with the remaining major part of its audience being in the Asia Pacific (around 750 million users), with India now becoming the number one market for Instagram.

Of course, those are estimates, but the data points give some context for what IG is seeing in the rest of the world, and where the app is the most popular.

So if you were trying to work out just how big IG is, and how significant it's become, this is the data that we know.