Instagram passes 500,000 advertisers, up by more than double in 7 months

Instagram has announced that it now has more than 500,000 advertisers using the platform to market their wares.

The milestone figure comes seven months after the Facebook-owned photo- and video-sharing service said it had passed 200,000 advertisers, meaning it has grown by around 150 percent since February. Given that Instagram discusses milestones in terms of “more than,” it’s difficult to arrive at an exact figure for that growth, but suffice it to say it has more than doubled in half a year.

Instagram first began allowing ads in the U.S. back in 2013, and it has been refining the offering and market availability in the three years since then. As its ads business has grown, so has its user-base — the company recently passed 500 million users, two-thirds of whom use the service each day.

The company says that the top countries for Instagram adoption among advertisers are the U.S., Brazil, U.K., Australia, and Canada.