Active Instagram users drops from 40 million to 17 million

Wallblog reports that Instagram loses half of its active users in a month, showing numbers from Appstats. Techcrunch has already offered ideas on why there's a fluctuation in the service suggesting that it's not the terms of service kerfluffle's fault. The anecdata around here where I and a bunch of people that I know who were active users deleted our accounts suggests that it was. Not that I was surprised they would change their TOS to sound more like facebooks, I did call it in that Adweek fast chat, nothing that the onesies of baby pictures are now media space "So, there are six little kids at Instagram who are overnight bazillionaires off your baby pictures."
The sharp drop on christmas day was just a sharp drop, a phenomena seen in other apps around christmas as Instagram pointed out. Less use when people have a few days off? Hmmm. One would think with all those Turkey and duck photos around thanksgiving, brag-pics of christmas hams and christmas trees would be clogging up the intarwebs.

Instagram did change that TOS, but didn't change #3, where where ads/paid promotions may not always be listed as commercial posts. This isn't legal in most of Europe, and I'm quite surprised nobody is calling Instagram (and Facebook) out on that.