Instagram, Snapchat Gaining On Facebook In Average Daily Usage

Apps like Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat thrive because they can convince people to spend more time looking at their phone screens, generating sweet ad revenue in the process. As such, specifically how much time people spend staring at these apps is of some importance.

Services like SimilarWeb exist to track that data, and according to its latest numbers, Facebook is losing ground in daily viewership to its more trendy social media counterparts. According to data gathered this month, Instagram is now a precariously close second place behind Facebook in terms of how many minutes people spend using the app on a daily basis, Recode reported.

SimilarWeb’s data found that users spent an average of 58.5 minutes on Facebook each day during June. Instagram, meanwhile, kept users hooked for 53.8 minutes, narrowing the gap to less than five points. Snapchat came in third at 49.5 minutes per day. Instagram has steadily gained on Facebook over the past year, according to the data.

It should be noted that this data came only from Android users in the United States. That means the numbers could potentially look significantly different if iOS and desktop web browsers were incorporated. Still, SimilarWeb’s findings suggest Instagram and Snapchat could soon be just as popular as Facebook on one of the world’s largest mobile ecosystems.

Painting it as a competition is not entirely accurate, as Facebook has owned Instagram since 2012. The photo-sharing app has an estimated value of more than $100 billion, according to Bloomberg. As Recode pointed out, the minutes-per-day statistic matters because that is how companies generate ad revenue.

Though it benefits these companies to have people stare at their phones as much as possible, some of them are taking measures to battle tech addiction. Data miners found an unreleased feature in Facebook’s Android app that will tell users exactly how much time they spend in the app and allow them to set time limits for themselves. Apple and Android will also do that on an operating system level in the near future.

Young people, specifically teens, have stopped using Facebook in droves in favor of more visually oriented social networks like Snapchat and YouTube. Facebook may hope to rope some of its younger members back in with a newly launched video game live-streaming hub and an upcoming dating service.