Instagram has hit 3 billion monthly users, parent Meta Platforms announced this week, an increase of one billion since the company last disclosed figures in October 2022. Meta’s other social platforms, Facebook and WhatsApp, both crossed the 3 billion mark earlier this year. The milestone coincides with a redesign of the Instagram app’s homepage putting more emphasis on Reels short-form videos and private messaging that have largely driven the platform’s growth. Meta has begun testing a version of the app in India that opens directly into Reels instead of a traditional feed.

That design is also being used for a newly released iPad app, Bloomberg reports, noting that “the changes are part of a broader effort to leverage Instagram’s most popular features — even if it means moving further away from the traditional photo feed that first made the app a global hit.”

Instagram chief Adam Mosseri explained in an Instagram post that the platform will “soon start testing a way for you to tune your algorithm by adding and removing topics based on your interests, starting with Reels,” as a new way to allow users to “shape what you see.”

Watching Reels accounts for “more than 50 percent of the time spent on Instagram,” Bloomberg writes, noting “most of those videos are recommended to users from outside the network of accounts they follow.” Private messaging is the way most people are sharing on the Instagram app, followed by disappearing Stories.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg celebrated the milestone with a post on Threads, the company’s newest social platform, which has more than 400 million monthly active users, the company announced in August, weeks after Threads turned two.

Instagram was launched in 2010 as a photo-sharing app. It was acquired for $1 billion by Meta (then known as Facebook) in 2012, and “has since become the most important source of revenue growth at the company, and the key vehicle for fending off rivals like TikTok, Snap Inc. and Elon Musk’s X,” Bloomberg reports.

Though Instagram is often accused of chasing TikTok on the social video front and copying Snapchat with its disappearing Stories, the Meta app has far outpaced that competition, with TikTok numbering 1.5 billion users, and Snapchat at about 800 million, according to Social Media Today.

Only Google’s YouTube, with about 2.7 billion MAUs, is knocking on the door of Meta’s 3 billion MAU club. “It’s difficult to overstate the significance of that number,” equivalent to roughly a third of the people in the world, says SMT.