A Blind Spot That 85 Million People Can See

First of all, let me do something I never do, which is point out just how wrong I was about something.

In February of 2014, I wrote a post detailing that while both Instagram Direct and Snapchat Stories seemed like good, useful new features of their parent apps, no one seems to be using them. That was a dumb thing to deduce. I obviously did it because no one I knew was using them. Lo! There are apparently more people in the world than just those I know.

Not only are people using Snapchat Stories, it seems to be the core of the product now. In fact, even I’m using Snapchat Stories. In more fact, that’s actually all I use Snapchat for. Times change.

Instagram Direct is less of a homerun, but as the company shared today, over 85 million of their 300 million active users are using it monthly. That’s a lot of people. It’s certainly not none.

Okay, with my faux pas disclosed, allow me to wade back into my ignorance for a second to point out something I still think is worth noting: it’s still true that basically no one I know uses Instagram Direct.

What’s wild about this to me is that basically every single person I know is an active user of Instagram. They just do not use the direct messaging functionality.

Now, today’s big update could very well change that — in fact, it probably will, it sounds like a great update. But it still fascinates me that in this day and age, something which 85 million people are using regularly can sneak up on me, in a product I’m regularly using.

No, I’m not a teenager, it’s true. And no, I don’t regularly hang out with teenagers — also true. If I did, maybe I wouldn’t be blind to this usage. And yes, I live in Silicon Valley (though I didn’t for the past year). And yes, it is in its own little bubble (lowercase “b”). Yadda yadda.

So let me rephrase: it’s fascinating that 80 million people on a service can use it in a way that’s so different from the other 220 million. Maybe that should be obvious, but it’s only in thinking about these Instagram Direct stats today that I started to think about usage of a service in this way.

In a way, this makes sense. For example, I basically only “use” Facebook to use Facebook Messenger. Far more people use Facebook to use Facebook.

Products that are extensible in this way, products that can support multiple major use cases, are not something I think about a lot. But maybe I should. Or maybe it’s just something that only products at massive scale — like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, etc — can achieve.

Regardless, interesting blind spot.