[The Next Web] Instagram says Thanksgiving 2013 was the service’s busiest day so far, but fails to share exact figures

146168661 520x245 Instagram says Thanksgiving 2013 was the services busiest day so far, but fails to share exact figures

Instagram today announced that Thanksgiving 2013 in the US was the service’s “busiest so far,” thanks to a massive flood of Thanksgiving and Hanukkah-related photos and videos. Unfortunately, the company failed to share exact figures, suggesting that if any records were broken, they weren’t huge.

That’s a big contrast to last year’s announcement, in which Instagram said Thanksgiving 2012 in the US broke multiple records and was also the busiest day for the mobile photo sharing service ever. This year, the “busiest” adjective is repeated again, but the closest we have to actual figures is this vague sentence: “We saw record usage as Instagrammers shared a heaping help of holiday cheer.”

Last year, the Facebook-owned company said it saw the number of shared photos more than double from the day before. This year, that apparently didn’t happen.

There are many potential reasons for a lack of numbers. The biggest is also the simplest: while Instagram is still the leader in the mobile photo sharing space, it’s no longer way ahead of the competition as it was last year.

The Facebook-owned company now has to deal with the likes of Vine and Snapchat. Add to that all the various messaging apps that support sharing media files, and you’re really competing for mobile users’ time.

Instagram’s press page still hasn’t been updated since Thanksgiving: the social network still sits at 16 billion photos total, with over 55 million photos uploaded each day. Facebook averages about 350 million photos uploaded daily (although that number refers to Q4 2012). Neither service breaks out video numbers.

We have reached out to Instagram for clarification and more information. We will update this post if we hear back.

Top Image Credit: Thomas Coes/Getty Images