My comment got too long and are two different responses. Splitting seems to make sense.

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IG is around 725M monthly active users now. I think their DAU is roughly 450M. A year ago, they were at around 500M MAU.

Snapchat is at 170M DAU. It was at 145M DAU in August 2016. It is now at roughly 330 MAU and 290 MAU in August 2016 (I know they were at ~300 MAU in November 2016).

IG is outpacing Snapchat by percentage of growth on top of sheer numbers while being far far larger, of course benefitting from being around longer. Snapchat has always been the underdog to Instagram.

There's no comparison of Google+ to FB in 2012 and Instagram to Snapchat in 2017 or any of the last few years. With IG always having been larger than Snap and recent user growth of IG massively outperforming Snap too -- "users will go back to to their previous habits" doesn't fit here or in Google+'a case.

There are likely few people who switched from Snapchat to just IG in recent months while treating it like Snapchat (mostly DMing and doing stories) outside of bigger online names using IG stories. There's nothing to reverse of going back to old habits. Meanwhile with Google+, it never even became a habit. Most people never really used it. It was a one or two off thing for the vast majority of users, mostly perpetrated by the pushing of existing users to try Google+.

If your point was about people going back to Snapchat stories over IG stories, I'm not so sure. Just like you, friends still mostly post to Snap stories. IG for me is like 10% of friends or acquaintances posting regular stories. But a ton of people popular accounts posting. I don't see this changing. So IG stories will also always be bigger than Snapchat if current trends stick.

Google Plus was a last ditch effort by a company to get, and keep, any kind of foothold in a market that they continually failed at. It was to my knowledge, at the very least, their fourth attempt (Orkut, open social, Google Buzz, Google Plus... am I missing one?). Calling it a "very real competitor" seems a bit overstated.

There were tons of skeptics of Google+ from the get go. Their way of getting users was dubious at best. We don't know how many users were ever true active users vs people who signed up because of having a Google/Gmail account already and checking out Google+ once or twice. Or creating a Google+ account and never coming back or coming back accidentally. Those all still counted as active users. It isn't just hindsight. People including me were calling this from day one.

IG has grown around 45% in the past year. Snapchat has grown half that, close to 23%. IG is the more established social network and growing faster. That's the worry. Sheer numbers make it look so much worse. Snapchat added around 50M new MAUs over the past year. IG did over 4x that at over 200M.

I remember seeing charts similar to the one you posted and dismissing it as BS back then too. As did others. It's a vanity metric. Without knowing the engagement, it is mostly meaningless. And most signs pointed to there being weak actual engagement. Especially if you look past those user's first one or two enhancements of G+. Most prob never engaged again. The same can't be said for the others. FB's first 50M users were by and large engaged. All the others were too, to different degrees. All far above Google+'s.

> am I missing one?

Google Reader and YouTube both predate G+, and were specialized social networks. One for links of any kind (you could share anything), and the other for videos.

IG has a much more active and diverse audience than plus ever did. In fact they are the king within their own world, where as plus was a me too product.

I just think they’re different worlds, with diff goals. Snap is more about your honest moment / communication thru pics where as IG is your idealized life.

Yes, IG is king of the general photo sharing social networks, which is different from what IG Stories and Snapchat do. That's why I brought up the comparison to Google Plus, Google did a lot of stuff that Facebook did, and Google Plus was an attempt at bringing a lot of these services together and create a Facebook competitor.

Like IG Stories, Google Plus had crazy fast growth at first, they hit almost 30 million users in the first month which was insane for that time and even today. They also had a very diverse audience. But, just like Instagram Stories, those numbers were only so high because most of their users were "users" because they were already partly on the platform through Gmail, like most IG Stories users were already IG users.

Look, I'm not saying IG Stories isn't a real competitor, but saying that Facebook didn't have competition during their IPO like Snapchat does is not true. Many people were predicting that Google Plus could kill Facebook. Read some articles from that time period, there was a lot of talk about that.

That's because many people have been looking for FB's demise for many years now. And generally people are pretty pro-Google. Especially the tech community. Including places like HN. So of course there would be articles and talk of Google+ being a threat. But it was always fluff.

There's articles to this day spelling the doom and gloom of Tesla. Just like there have been many for the past decade. It has always been one of the most shorted stocks. This isn't directly analogous, but just because a large amount of people believe this doesn't mean there aren't also a large amount of people who don't. Aka these people won't have hindsight bias either.

Many people also did not think Google+ was ever a threat, myself included. Google+ was always the butt of jokes with my friends with their inflated user numbers. So there isn't any hindsight bias from me or my friends or many discussions and articles I read during the time that didn't take G+ seriously.

IG stories isn't identical to Snap stories yet. IG is starting to think about allowing you to limit who you post content to. I assume this will be done with nice UX. Then the direct comparison of Snap and IG stories can be made. For now, IG stories main ground it has taken from Snap is unlikely to go back to Snap. People or companies with bigger audiences. IG makes more sense as a place to post your stories for these users.

It's likely that IG stories ratio of users who only consume stories is much greater than Snap. And the avg IG story has many more viewers. But Snapchat likely has many more stories posted.

Google+ wasn't real user growth. The number of active users was high because of such a weak definition reeking of BS.

The actual engagement rate was always weak (I'm defining it as purposefully reading or posting to google+).

Within a couple months, it was essentially nothing. I don't think Google+ ever sniffed 100M monthly active users after the initial two months of going completely public and having the hype. I'd think if it was 9 figures in active uses for the first few months, it was because a majority of people tried it once or twice or just did the Google+ profile creation. This is big because it means Google+ was never a real competitor in terms of popularity.

Google+ never felt like a threat at all to FB. And within a few months of public availablity, didn't seem like a threat of being a prominent social network behind FB either.

> Google Plus was a very real competitor when they launched (right around the time of Facebook's IPO)

Has Google Plus at any point ever had as much as 2 percent of FB's active users? If not, what metric do you use to consider it a "very real competitor" at some point in time?