Meta [META] said back on May 27 that Instagram Plus and Facebook Plus, its $3.99 subscription tiers, had “officially launched” worldwide. There was a slow rollout though. For more than three months after that, nothing in Apptopia’s in-app purchase (IAP) revenue estimates for either app moved. Then on September 9, in-app purchase revenue for both apps broke sharply higher, and kept climbing every day since. Instagram’s worldwide daily revenue is averaging $1.2 million (up 475% from the week before to hit an all-time record), while Facebook’s daily revenue has surged 143% to average $528k, also setting a new record for itself.
Instagram’s worldwide IAP revenue averaged $209k a day for the eight weeks before the 9th. Since then it’s averaged $1.2 million, up 475%, and every single day in that stretch has topped the app’s previous all-time daily high of $402,000, set back in August 2024.
Worldwide IAP revenue of Facebook is averaging $528k a day since the 9th, up 143% from its prior run rate, and that too is a record, clearing the $376k daily high Facebook set in March 2021. Instagram is doing roughly three times the incremental dollar volume Facebook is, consistent with it being the more engagement-driven, younger-skewing app in Meta’s family.
The US is punching above its usual weight. US users accounted for 32% of Instagram’s and 39% of Facebook’s post-September 9 revenue—roughly 10 percentage points above each app’s historical US baseline. Before the 9th, American users generated about 22% of Instagram’s worldwide IAP revenue and 28% of Facebook’s. Both apps’ US share has held in a tight band day to day rather than spiking once and fading, so this reads as a real shift in where the money is coming from, not noise from one big day.
BNP Paribas has Meta’s subscription push adding $13.5 billion in revenue by 2028, and Truist has it at $20 billion by 2030, both built on the idea that hundreds of millions of users eventually pay for a Plus tier. Meta reports third-quarter earnings in late October.
