Instagram has 130M monthly active users and 16B uploaded photos

Photo-sharing app Instagram has swelled to over 130 million monthly active users, according to founder Kevin Systrom, who simultaneously announced the app’s Vine competitor this morning.

We last heard that the Facebook-owned app had 100 million users in September 2012. Instagram is a photo-sharing app that provides photographic elements such as filters and borders to make your photos look professional. Systrom says its users have uploaded over 16 billion photos thus far. And its community is interacting with the photos, “liking” 1 billion of them a day.

But the app has focused predominately on photos while Twitter’s competitor app Vine has taken over the minivideo market. It seemed natural that Instagram would also turn to videos, and it did so today with a feature that allows you to take 15-second videos that can be made up of one stream, or a number of clips. It also lets you overlay those filters and use a special “cinema” tool to reduce shaking.

Compared to the overall digital market, advertising opportunity for mobile video is much smaller, according to eMarketer. Overall, digital video advertising is expected to grow to $4.1 billion this year whereas mobile video advertising is expected to grow to $518 million. However, that’s a 112 percent growth for mobile video, which likely is a statistic that would interest Zuckerberg. Thus far, we haven’t seen any advertising in Instagram, so whether the company will take advantage of these statistics in video is unknown. For more on mobile advertising, check out the advertising track “Brands and agencies: Mobile advertising hell — or heaven” at VentureBeat’s MobileBeat conference.

Instagram image via Facebook live stream