Instagram Is Estimated to Be Worth More Than $100B
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Edit: Also worth pointing out that you could argue Facebook's infrastructure was hugely important to their growth. Instagram was literally almost anonymous profiles. However, once FB got everyone to connect their FB accounts (which they may have been able to do with only a phone number as I did notice this became a requirement), they gave advertisers and brands a lot off resources and tools (and reasons) to devote money and energy to the platform.
Edit: All the points below are true too, of course. I do find myself subconsciously opening instagram a scary amount, so seems one reason to switch it up would be to always have fresh content. I do agree that once you get to where you last left off, you're likely to exit the app.
With a chronological feed, you remember where you left off, so when you scroll down to that point you know you’re all caught up and there isn’t more to see.
With a non-chronological feed, you end up scrolling down way more by fear of missing out, giving them the opportunity to show you way more cancer aka ads.
Given a set of ordered posts you might see ACDB, then when you check in next you'll see HFGEACDB whereas in a chronological timeline it'd end up at HGFEDCBA, but once you've seen that out of order "DCBA>ACDB" section it stays in that order.
tl;dr — Every successful social startup should bend, but not completely violate, one or more social taboos, e.g. one of the 7 deadly sins.
Edit: When designing www.fwdeveryone.com, we purposely incorporated Pav's theory by building the platform around the taboo of getting involved in other people's relationships, in this case by letting people read (and reply to) other people's email conversations.
Of course, it came at the expense of artists, who aren't making as much off of Spotify as they did off of album sales. Well, not the top X artists anyway, I like to think that the artists that used to be in the long tail are now doing pretty well for themselves. Relatively.
Just last week I was belittled, because I didn't want to come to office two times a week at 9am.
...oh wait, that's a real thing that you did. You just didn't put the http:// in your comment to avoid self-promotion.
After reading your examples (which are a really helpful way of showing what your service does, BTW - thanks for not burying that in a video or forcing me to sign up), I can see the appeal for your service. It's Instagram for email: In exactly the way I keep every photo my phone takes backed up and organized on Google Photos, but selectively post to Instagram, I could selectively send mail on a "social email" account and keep normal transactions private. Fascinating! I suppose I have a small portfolio of emails helping some people solve problems (running/cycling tips, local routes, etc and some tech support) that I have meant to post to a blog but just never got around to it. Making that blogging automatic would be neat!
Nice idea and implementation, I apologize for mocking it! I'll definitely keep the principle in mind.
We currently use read-only OAuth, so basically the same in terms of friction but easier to secure.
> And users wouldn't need to inform people who email them that their email is public
We actually currently require double opt-in permission for each message contributor in a thread to share stuff publicly. That might change in the future, we're still playing around with the model.
The new best practice with social apps is basically to launch while erring on the side of having too much friction for the app to be successful, and then keep successively reducing the friction for people contributing positively to the community. Otherwise you risk gaining a bunch of immediate traction but going into the death spiral of negativity, which is the main way that social startups die if they already have initial traction.
This wouldn't have worked ten years ago, but it makes more sense in a world where things take off more slowly anyway due to increased network saturation.
As a side note, it amuses me to see this repeated so often, given that it's not true. If you do the math, Spotify pays about the same as a radio play. You just have to remember that each radio play goes out to a few hundred thousand to a few million people each time.
The reason artists don't like Spotify is not because they pay poorly, it's because they pay fairly. When you get a radio play, it's assumed that all the people the station reaches listened to the song. Spotify knows exactly how many people listened to a song, and pay accordingly. Unpopular artists don't like this because they get accurate counts.
That said, it's an easy statement for me to make given that I was buying music on vinyl, then CD, then digital downloads before there was much in the way of streaming. So, even leaving aside the vinyl, I had a large collection of owned music before modern streaming hit in a big way. I still buy things every now and then but I have a large core of older music I care about--which is the bulk of what I'm interested in.
I was similarly never willing to pay for HBO before on-demand streaming, but am willing to pay now.
From what I understand, they actually pay based on how many times a song is played, which is not the same as how many people listened to it. If I only listen to an unpopular artist, but I don't listen as often as other people listen to popular artists (lower play count, even though it's still my favorite artist), nearly all of my subscription fee goes to the popular artists.
In the old days of purchasing music, it didn't matter how many times a person played the disc/track - it cost the same. You might argue that each play represents the marginal utility to the listener (and should thus be the basis for compensation), but I'm not sure that's entirely true.
Yes, I should have been more precise. Just like with a radio play, the second play in theory goes to the same mass of people, but is counted again. So I should have said "they know exactly how many people and how many times it was played, and pay accordingly". I believe they discount multiple plays from the same person, to prevent abuse.
> In the old days of purchasing music, it didn't matter how many times a person played the disc/track - it cost the same. You might argue that each play represents the marginal utility to the listener (and should thus be the basis for compensation), but I'm not sure that's entirely true.
You might argue that, but you might also argue that when you bought a CD, you bought 10-15 tracks, even if you only wanted one or two. So again, for a consumer, Spotify is more fair, because you only pay for what you consume, and artists liked the old model where you paid for 15 tracks even if you only wanted two.
My same argument applies to a single track purchased via iTunes - it doesn't matter how many times you play it; it costs the same. The bundling of tracks on an album is something all artists did/do, so it doesn't affect the fairness question in my opinion (at least, not fairness between artists).
This is not true IMHO. You need approximately 4 million plays per month to get the equivalent of Californian minimum wage! [1]
[1] https://mashable.com/2018/01/31/copyright-court-rules-stream...
Edit: You might get might more if you own all the rights yourself but not many artists do.
Interesting concept, but that one is a bit of a stretch...
I agree that Instagram could not have grown to this size without being part of Facebook.
Instagram has always been supplementary to Facebook, it was never a candidate to replace it.
Agree on the event planning though. I think an Instagram Events would immediately get adopted by many young people.
Fair point about the event planning ... if FB were to cross-launch the sane event planning DB on instagram and whatsapp, I suspect that would be pretty much a killer app.
I mean that's about as 2018 as it gets. I'm not entirely sure if that's a permanent trend though.
This acquisition was genius on Zuckerberg's part.
It's a fact, not theory because facebook is where you are friends with mom, dad, grandma, and aunt suzie. IG is where you like hot women, fetishes, gucci bags, and whatever nonsense mom /dad/aut suzie might disapprove of. You keep up appearances on FB and get nasty on IG.
Say what you want about Zuckerberg but the guy was well ahead of his time and could see how things would evolve and what tick with people brains.
Yes, just not a way to make something that improves our lives.
Or even if you manage to make something that improves our lives, advertising is an incentive to pervert it and hold it back (e.g. you create a social network so people from all over the world can meet, then ads make you cripple it, force feed BS to them, milk them with spam, exploit their private data, and so on...)
Instagram would have died an early death if you had to pay for it, and hiding certain features behind a pay wall would alienate 90% of the users.
That would be a bonus.
>hiding certain features behind a pay wall would alienate 90% of the users
Only before they have conditioned differently from an industry that has been legally allowed to trade private information for ad money.
I honestly don't think that would be a loss for humanity.
I have also bought many products from other businesses that have made my life better. In most instances, I have only become aware of these products because these businesses have spent money on ad campaigns.
That could have been a valid argument in 1970.
Today we have the internet. Instead of advertising it's not perfectly possible and easy to have other means of discoverability:
a) professional product reviews - a review site visit or Google search away
b) actual user reviews -- an aggregator site or Google search away
c) the product makers marketing material on their own website
d) blogs from people using the product
e) forums with people exchanging advice/complaints about the product
f) videos of people unboxing, using, showcasing, etc the product
g) the specs of the product, product manual, photos, etc online
h) online communities around a product category
i) for digital products, one could also try a trial/time limited/shortened /watermarked version of them
j) for products we encounter physically on some shop's shelves and want to know more about them, a quick Google search or QR Code can take us to the product page (and/or all of the above)
Unlike advertisement, none of these give an unfair lead to the maker than can spend more campaign money.
What's best, most of these add informational value (like scores, real world complaints, professional reviewing, etc) that ads, by definition, don't have.
We literally have more ways than ever to discover products, and to find the best products. Advertising is just random producers (random quality wise: just the company with the bigger pockets) shouting to make their wares stand out.
If any of these are on the internet, then people there will be pixel trackers, and people are going to measure the distinct number of impressions. I don't think this is a bad thing.
If we stretch the notion of advertising to mean "anything that can bring something to one's attention", then yes.
In that case I'm making explicit that by "advertising" in my first comment I referred not to these things, but to what's colloquially referred to as "advertising" -- namely paid tv ads, paid banners, sponsored posts on Facebook, and so on.
Not user forums, not legitimate reviews etc.
>If any of these are on the internet, then people there will be pixel trackers, and people are going to measure the distinct number of impressions. I don't think this is a bad thing
Well, I don't think "measuring the distinct number of impressions" in those kind of websites is a bad thing either.
What I said I consider bad is advertisements, that is getting money from a business for pitching THEIR message (as opposed to objective facts or a reviewer's/user's subjective review), selling your users' private info to them or using it to target them with ads, etc.
Let's imagine for a moment that it was made illegal for a content producer or social website etc to take money, in any kind of form, directly or indirectly, from any product maker, or anyone selling something (that is, no selling ads themselves, and no being paid to show ads).
What would remain on the web to discover products would be all the above I've described.
Did he really predict that, or did he just see an upcoming potential competitive threat and buy it?
I feel bad for the founders of Instagram. They could have been the next Zuckerberg(s) (as Instagram seems to be taking over as Facebook seems to be starting to fade), but instead they're subordinates in Zuckerberg's empire.
Ok. Beyond that, why do you assume the valuation would be exactly the same had they not sold to FB?
That would be half a _billion_ and, generally, I don't "feel bad" for people who don't attain their dream of climbing the Forbes leader board (assuming that is even a goal for these two.)
Having 11 people try to manage a site of that scale is just asking them to keep doggypaddling to avoid drowning.
Like Snapchat, you mean? The risk is that, failing to acquire Instagram, Facebook could have built a clone and turned their massive user base to it. Instagram could have been in a distant third place. We'll never know.
That's like feeling bad for someone who sold bitcoins at $10. The company they sold was worth $1bn (to Facebook) at the time. It was not worth $100bn.
https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/instagram#section-lo...
The link I pasted simply had a list of Instagram's financing rounds.
April 5th, 2012, Series B $50m
April 9th, 2012 Purchased by FB, $1b
Several days before being acquired by Facebook, Instagram raised a $50m Series B on a $500m premoney evaluation, which gave investors 10% of the company.
Typically in order to grant 10% worth of preferred stock for a raise, the company has to increase the number of shares. If there were 100 shares prior to the raise, and a had 1, I would have 1/100 or 1%. If there are now 110 shares, and I still have 1, it's now 1/110 or < 1%
A few days later, the company was sold for $1b.
1/100 * 1b = $10,000,000
1/110 * 1b = $9,090,000
In my contrived example about dilution, with my 1/110%, I lost out ~$1m, and for seemingly no benefit to the company.
Bringing it back to my original comment, employees as a collective, would have lost out significant money, for seemingly no benefit, while Sequoia benefited tremendously.
I should caveat my post:
--This is pure speculation on a number of fronts. Any number of scenarios could be true (even if unlikely)
* IG could have had 10% shares already allocated in reserve for a Series B, and never had to issue more. Employees would still in effect lose out on money, but not because of dilution.
* With that $50m in cash, IG could have paid out hefty bonuses to employees. IIRC at the time of acquisition IG had ~19 people.
* IG could have issued anti-dilution to everyone, keeping relative % near the same.
* The SeriesB may have had to happen in order for Sequoia to agree to the sale.
>A few days ago it was rumored to be valued at $500 million. A few months ago it was $300 million. Its last round — just a year ago — valued the company at $100 million.
It was already the hot thing when he bought it. (https://gigaom.com/2012/04/09/here-is-why-did-facebook-bough...)
The other numbers are good, but then other companies also grow at similar rates. How come Instagram is the $100B valued company with 1B users and Whatsapp has over 1.5B users? And both are growing still. You’d think there would be another company coming at them.
For Whatsapp as a messenger the only service close to them is Messenger with around 1.4B users (you could say WeChat or Line/KakaoTalk as well though they are mostly popular in east Asia only). And Messenger is a sister product.
YouTube is a similar knock out success. Huge mindshare beyond its huge numbers, but it isn’t a profit machine like Instagram.
So it’s just Facebook that controls the 4 biggest social networks/messengers outside China. Along with some of them being the fastest growing services as well to this day.
All of this is to again say it wasn’t completely obvious Instagram would become this big. Other companies also grow and get valued highly quickly. And almost no other companies or services get as big as Instagram, which is still growing.
Finally, the zeitgeist at the time of the purchase was of shock at the price tag. Almost no one thought it was worth the billion dollar price.
Kim Kardashian has a 110 million followers. After the Russians (or whoever...maybe just that "400 pound dude in the basement") get her to become the next president I am waiting to see what boywonder shows up and says to Congress.
We know what he and his exec staff thought about fake news before the election. Now who here thinks fake imagery is not a thing? Just take a look at the content produced by the top 100 accounts.
There is going to be a special place in history for the damage boywonder has done. People will have to invent new terms to describe it. Nothing like it has happened ever before.
Also, as it was made that Instagram only had 7 employees when they were purchased, that's actually one of major reasons why the acquisition worked so well. 7 employees for an application of that scale is not "swift and agile", it's criminally understaffed. After the Facebook acquisition, Facebook was able to easily redirect some of their hires to work on Instagram which allowed Instagram's original workforce to actually be able to worry about things other than just keeping their heads above water. It's definitely not ridiculous to credit some of Instagram's success to the acquisition itself.
FB was pretty slow to monetize Instagram, and they still had hired 100s of people pretty quickly after the acquisition.
Before facebook bought Whatsapp they only had 5 employees. But they had the best engineers for the task at hand. In fact they’re famous for handling 2 million TCP connections on a single server due to much of their engineering decisions (including choice of tech stack). And it’s not like they weren’t generating revenue. Before facebook acquired them, their $1 fee earned them $1billion the first 9 months.
And additional features are going to add massive complexity and decrease your ability to scale relatively quickly. Sure, with the right engineering you might be able to run a relatively light operation if you have a feature-set well thought out, but as soon as you want to add any other thing-a-mo-bob to the operation it gets much harder.
Whatsapp also only had a couple hundred million users back in 2014. So they’d have no way to make a billion even if they charged everyone. Which they didn’t. They barely charged anyone.
For one: we still don't really really understand network effects. There's huge value to being Facebook (you're forced to be there because all your friends are there and most nowhere else), but people also switch platforms for reasons that are not excellently understood. And when I say bubble I don't mean this or that company -- Silly Valley big money is basically all bet on network effects.
(I.e. Instagram is worth $100B under the premise that I can't build an Instagram killer (that actually kills it) in a short period of time. And jeez, it's not fundamentally different from Geocities + Frontpage, just has better UX)
Before I’d run different affiliate offers through them. Though back then for those, Instagram wasn’t that big. Might start again if the opportunity works out.
The returns are good or it would be crazy to put that much money into the ads.
The point is that due to network effects (which lock users in to a platform), ads are monopoly-priced. But network effects are not super well understood and platform collapses do happen.
So we know the ads market to be large -- or at least people on HN are testifying to that effect, but we don't know that Facebook or MySpace or Lycos get to appropriate it to a long enough period of time that current valuations make sense on a no-bullshit NPV basis.
A fair point was made elsewhere that multiples (which are more or less like stock market folklore, but still allow for comparison across multiple industries) in these companies are relatively modest.
Oculus while not a huge success was also only bought for a few billion. Not a bad loss. Parse wasn’t bought for that much. It might’ve not been a loss either.
When two of their bigger acquisitions are slam dunk successes or just successes, that’s a pretty good record.
BUT, I hate to admit this, the ads I get in Instagram are the most relevant I have ever gotten. I actually look forward to them, to discover new products. They are perfectly tailored to me.
Dammit.
Welcome to the machine.
Your primary function to society is to consume.
Congratulations.
Your life also doesn't have to revolve around finding something new to buy/consume.
What's wrong with that?
Among the biggest problems with ads are that when they are the primary economic model for these services, they will tweak everything to favor paid ads as much as they can get away with. That means everything from conflicts-of-interest around serving the needs of the biggest advertisers to undermining organic (non-paid-ads) discovery of products and services…
Can you expand on this? I also can't really parse what your second paragraph is trying to say. How do businesses that rely on ads undermine organic product discovery, and what conflict of interests could they have?
1. Products reliant on advertising for revenue are incentivized to increase the amount of ads shown (per user and in total). This leads to product strategy which prioritizes growth and engagement above all. The line between "highly engaging" and "addictive" products becomes very thin, arguably disappearing entirely.
2. In order to provide highly targeted ads, companies must necessarily collect, store and organize a tremendous amount of data on their users. We have seen over and over again that this data can then be requested, stolen or tapped by governments, hostile actors and other powerful organizations for nefarious purposes without the consent of the user.
2. Source? Outside of a few edge cases (china) I don't think this is a real concern. The same can happen with financial (or any) data, but I don't see people saying the data is the problem. Rather its the processes around that data that need fixing.
Advertising revenue is ad CPM (how valuable the ad is and how well it's targeted) multiplied by ad impressions (which is why people measure page views, time on site, minutes watched, etc.) Both matter in the model.
2. Beyond China and other authoritarian governments, the Cambridge Analytica affair is perhaps the defining example of this. It showcased nonconsensual data harvesting with malicious use of the data against those users to impact politics both domestically and internationally: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/us/politics/cambridge-ana...
Here another example from just a week ago: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/climate/koch-brothers-pub...
> "Central to the work of Americans for Prosperity is i360, the Kochs’ data operation, which profiles Americans based on their voter registration information, consumer data and social media activities."
In other words, the topic is the advertising where you give your attention to one party and that party participates (gets paid) to show you something else different from what you went there to see.
So, concretely: this is about paid ads on Facebook. This is NOT about products listed on Amazon that show up with compelling descriptions when you search for that type of product and clink on a link that wasn't higher in the list because someone paid for that.
When you go to Amazon and search, you are specifically choosing to put your attention toward products of a certain sort and asking for information. Amazon is delivering that information. There's marketing in how the products present themselves, but it's still something you are actively looking for, given to you second-party by the company from whom you are considering buying the thing.
When you go to Facebook to see how your friends are doing and your attention there gets sold to advertisers to show you unrelated products that may happen to fit your interests, that is the topic of discussion here.
1. Given capital being so unequally distributed, paid ads amount to amplification of the messages from those who happen to have money. In another framing: you see ads about mediocre products with a big marketing budget; you don't see ads about wonderful products that have little marketing budget.
2. The conflict of interest is where Facebook has an incentive not to highlight too much the non-paid posts from people that mention products that don't pay for advertising. If you were to consistently see non-paid posts that gave you all the info you need to get products and services you appreciate, then the advertisers wouldn't be seeing their ads pay off and might cut back on paying Facebook for ads.
Overall, attention is somewhat zero-sum. Your attention to one thing is not attention to something else. You never really know what you're missing. But in an ad-driven system, attention is biased toward (but not exclusively) whatever serves those things connected with ad money.
What annoys me are ads for products I've already purchased (amazon is terrible about this), or the same ad plastered 20 times across multiple sites.
Instagram handles ads pretty well IMO. They are non-intrusive, easy to digest, and highly relevant.
Facebook OTOH, has become one giant scrolling, auto-playing, clickbait/video ad. There is essentially 90% junk to 10% information (posts/photos/etc). IG has the same ratio but in reverse.
People love to bemoan the horrors of internet advertising, but tbh I find it way less intrusive than other forms of ad placements (TV, radio, billboards).
Except autoplay vids w/ audio. Those should be banned flat out.
(I'm fine with ad-supported products, but I see it as a necessary evil of the transaction, not as a win).
You also have the option to fully block ads using extensions/plugins - nothing like that really exist for cable tv/radio/public spaces.
Talk about damming with faint praise. Ads are the top reason why I no longer listen to radio, and the TV is only bearable because I have a DVR.
That said, those are just annoying. Online ads are much more dangerous.
Lots of poor advertising methods have tainted the industry unfortunately but marketing is directly responsible for the success of every single corporation and the immense amount of content and information we all get to enjoy.
If I had to pay millions to shove my product in people’a faces because that’s the only way to get them to use it, I would reconsider whether my product should even exist.
Demand for different products is generated very differently depending on the product. Some things travel by word of mouth, some things don't.
The comment I was criticising claimed they were spending millions a month on FB & Insta only, which seems astronomical and raises some concerns about whether the product provides any value at all.
How? Spending on fb/insta is no different than print & tv. Air BnB ads are probably 5x as effective on FB than on a billboard, how does that say anything about their product?
Web ads, on the other hand...
I don’t see obvious scams, phishing or malware being advertised on TV or print, but I saw a lot of them back when I was on Facebook, and even reporting them didn’t do anything.
Most companies do paid marketing. I’d also suggest there are probably many things that you think of as general promotion (events, sponsorships, talks, community engagement, more) which are in fact brand marketing, and that for most companies brand marketing is an inefficient use of funds compared to performance marketing.
You seem to have a very misaligned thought on why advertising occurs and why it works, especially for a relative small timer like the poster (since a couple million is a drop in the bucket for IG/FB).
I never developed this intentionally, it just sort of developed.
My point is, I suppose, that I've no idea how good the advertising is on my instagram account because I really don't see the ads.
I wish I could pay a fee to get rid of ads and get a reverse chronological feed.
The only thing I can think of that would make them not do this is that maybe the folks most likely to pay $15/mo not to see advertisements are the same folks advertisers most want to get in front of. Expendable income and willing to pay money for convenience and personal taste.
What I was even more impressed by is that after I bought one, I never saw another Gravity Blanket ad again.
My girlfriend uses it when she's having troubles sleeping, she says that it really does put her to sleep quite well.
However, she says that there is a bit of adjustment, when you wake in the night or in the morning, there is a slight moment of panic when you don't have your strength back and are in a sleepy haze, because you have a bit of trouble moving around. But you get used to that.
When you receive it, you have to tie the weighted insert down with cloth ties inside the washable cover. I wish there were more of these on the inside though, the weighted part of the blanket can get too out-of place for my liking, and I also don't trust the ties to hold up for very long if you're not careful moving it. It definitely takes two hands and a good grip to get the blanket on top of you.
As a consumer, I would much prefer ads that are carefully tailed to my interests - software, fitness, general aviation - than see wildly different ads on the same platform, or the same 2-3 high paying ads for the latest garbage CBS sitcom. As a business owner, I would much rather pay $10-12 per click on one of my ads that is highly targeted to demographics, income, technology use, browsing history (of my sites, re-targeting etc) than pay $0.10 per click on a completely dumb ad with insight into who is actually clicking.
This idea is complete bologna in my opinion. People aren't trying to fight the existence of ads (e.g., movie trailers, magazines, sports ads on ESPN, maybe even the off native ad) -- people are fighting the invasive, predatory, and downright deceitful nature of the current online advertising model.
> "As a consumer, I would much prefer ads that are carefully tailed to my interests"
Don't we all want this? But when getting ads tailored to my interest comes with the price tag of having these exchanges/platforms follow me around for the rest of my internet life (or until I delete their cookies) -- the cost doesn't seem to be worth the benefit (to many, but obviously not all)
> "As a business owner, I would much rather pay $10-12 per click on one of my ads that is highly targeted to demographics, income,"
Of course. You've just exposed your vested interest in this topic. So it's not surprising that your personal opinion aligns with your business interests.
Not me. I’d rather no ads, but if I can’t block them I’d prefer irrelevant ads to targeted ads. They waste my attention equally, but one does not require the collection of my personal data.
Yeah if this doesn't scream "astroturfing for an ad company" I don't know what is anymore.
Sorry, I'd rather keep up the good fight of being the owners of my attention. Pushing back against ads isn't "sad" or "quixotic" at all, and in fact should be celebrated.
To all the downvoters - are you saying instagram doesn't use your phone microphone to serve you ads? It definately does. It's happened to me countless times.
It will only grow bigger and at some point when it becomes too big, you see less friends posts and more advts and people move on to something else. But for next 2 years, Instagram's going to be Yuuuge.(Huge)
In reality, those people don't have that lifestyle. They're simply marketers and FOMO generators, but our brains aren't super good at seeing past that.
It's analogous to how regular people don't realize just how much Photoshop and photographic skill goes into making someone look as good as they do in magazines and on their IG feed. We look at them and immediately conclude that we're some kind of a sub-human degenerate species compared to them, whereas in reality it's all bullshit.
It feels SO much better to swim in one's lane, not looking around to see how everybody else is doing, especially when it's not real.
I'm not a religious person, but there's something really powerful in the admonition not to not covet your neighbor's spouse, house, animals (car?) etc. Except it's much worse with IG, where you're exposed daily to hundreds if not thousands of "neighbors" who are all showing off their pretend-success.
The genius of IG is that it makes people willingly subscribe to hours of marketing every day.
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This is not going to be one of the best tech acquisitions of the next decade. YouTube helped to propel Google into content. It also helped to commoditise web video in a massive way: reminiscent of the way which Google commoditised search (YouTube is probably just short of being a byword for online video at this point).
Instagram is a photo service in a sea of other photo services. Photography has been around on the web in meaningful ways for a long time. Flickr lost out to Facebook in the community stakes, and Instagram is doing great in whatever-the-fuck market it's in (the share-to-my-twitter-followers market?), but this is not Google acquiring YouTube.
Bookmark this comment. See you in 2022.
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I'm not even sure I'd call Instagram as a photo service anymore. The original core functionality (using it as a digital polaroid and applying a filter) doesn't even seem to be something people use at all anymore. I'm not even sure the majority of the posts are even photos—what between the random images with text above them, screenshots, and the videos.
Instagram was a photo service in a sea of other photo services. Now it's a generic social network where you just post whatever.
My likes on Instagram aren't shown to my followers - (I hope ) and that's the main difference which affects my behavior. Likes on instagram are cheap, like a casual double tap. On FB or LinkedIn they're expensive.
The major difference in developed countries is that the new post-millenial generation aren't seeing the same usage patterns.
Your likes actually are shared with your followers.
It's somewhat useful for discovering new accounts but I wish it could be toggled off.
I caught myself a few months ago scrolling through that page for almost 30 minutes before realizing what I had been doing. I now have to be very intentional about not going down that constantly-refreshing feature for more than a few minutes.
Anytime I ask my wife what she's doing on her phone, it's almost always Instagram. No more Snapchat, no more Pinterest, and no more "official" Facebook.
Do you have "feeds" with pictures that correspond to a specific interest of yours? (Is Instagram actually the best place to find interesting pictures on a range of topics?)
Do you post a lot yourself or is it virtually all "consumption"?
Would you say the identity of the posters plays a significant role (friends, celebrities... ?) or is it really more about the content?
Sorry for the barrage of questions, feel free to ignore any or all of them!
> Do you have "feeds" with pictures that correspond to a specific interest of yours? (Is Instagram actually the best place to find interesting pictures on a range of topics?)
Yes, the explore page has tabs for topics.
> Do you post a lot yourself or is it virtually all "consumption"?
Both. Consumption of all my different interests from small and major content producers. Then I post my photos to my ~150 friends.
> Would you say the identity of the posters plays a significant role (friends, celebrities... ?) or is it really more about the content?
Content for me, but I do seek out some specific accounts because I know what to expect.
Obviously I'm looking at this wrong - it's clearly not an app for posting photos, because it sucks at that.
its like why cosmopolitan gives bad and ridiculous relationship advice
but yes, you are looking at it wrong
Instagram gets away from all scrutiny by looking like a toy. Like when you are hacking someone's wifi with a Nintendo 3DS while they are wondering the appeal of this cute device for children. Instagram is likely the most technologically sophisticated social network out there and has been for a while.
The UI merely escaped feature creep for most of the decade.
The point of Instagram isn't to be able to see the wrinkles in that model's face. The point of Instagram is that you can't see the wrinkles in that model's face.
I do some serious-amateur and (when I'm lucky) semi-pro quality photography using a "real camera". I was going to post some of them on Instagram, but discovered that I can't do it except maybe via the phone app. But there's no way I'm shuttling photos from my desktop to my phone so that I can upload them to Instagram.
Apparently you can post from the browser if you change your user agent and pretend to be using a mobile browser, so it's specifically desktop browsers that they don't want you to use.
Like you said, it's not an app to post photos. It's all about the feed of pictures, not the pictures themselves. It's visual communication, not art.
But as I commute to work and back (hour by bus or train) - it's often 35+ aged people who have their eyes glued to instagram/facebook the entire length of the trip.
EDIT: Data shows that you're probably right, and millenials spend more [time]( https://www.statista.com/statistics/267138/social-media-usag...). A lot around 3 hours even.
O/T, but the millennials are born between 1980 to 1990/1992. The generation after are post-millenials, for lack of a better word.
Millenials are now all adults. :) A good chunk of the millennial generation is now in the child-having and house-buying (well, maybe not the later, too many avocados) stage of life!
Fantastic...
I have some adult friends regularly spending upwards of that. Boggles my mind.
Unlike most platforms, Instagram cuts strait to the most depressing part: pictures. I've had enough with social media, and I envy those who never created a Facebook.
Facts don't matter. Only opinions, how we choose to see them and agree on its meaning as a group matters.
Except for watch people, none of it is carefully curated 'look at me' experiences. Watch people are another stripe though.... $20k on the wrist, $200k steering wheel.
10 years ago, no one every would have accused someone who brings his DSLR onto a hike of "not experiencing" the hike. (Though you might have a point that it would have been pretty weird to have brought a camera to brunch just to get a great photo of your eggs benny)
A follower with a terminal illness wrote a heartfelt letter to a popular Instagram influencer that they followed and whose photos they enjoyed. When they passed away, the letter was sent on their behalf to the influencer.
When the influencer received the letter, they quickly skimmed through it, said “Cool” and tossed it in the trash with some other junk mail.
What should they have done? Reached out to the family of the anonymous follower? What does the "popular Instagram influencer" owe to someone who enjoys his/her photos?
What's depressing though is not that people post pictures of a life you wish you had, they do it while not giving a shit about you, no matter how much you might admire them. If you have millions of followers, or maybe even a couple hundred thousand, then statistically a few die everyday, without even so much as a passing thought.
And yet we waste so much time looking at these people's content and letting it depress us, and not enough at those around us who matter more.
what? is it some virus you can't cure from your mind now? just stop using it. I stopped about 6 years ago and have never missed it.
I moved to instagram and twitter.
Mind you, 100B for an app that is filled with bots and corporate accounts makes me think whoever did the valuation has never actually used IG.
Well that's incorrect Facebook is only like $5 bucks per share off their all time high: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/FB/
To their credit, the app was extremely simple back then, today it has managed to add complexity without being so overwhelming(although Instagram TV adds more eyesore to the screen), slowly they copied good, proven features and blended well into the Facebook ecosystem.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2012/04/13/instagrams-user-count-now-...
> Monopoly? In 2012, Instagram had 40 million users and no revenue[1]. Hardly a monopoly.
I think you misunderstand. Facebook is the monopoly in the grandparent, not the independent Instagram.
I believe the GP's point is that the government should have blocked FB's acquisition of IG, so IG could have provided competition for FB.
In hindsight, sure, we'd all love that. But seeing the recent FB hearings with congress, it seems they are still figuring out what the internet is.
It's either that or YouTube. I guess you could argue for Apple acquiring NeXT, but that's an acquisition that isn't really able to be measured in the same way.
Also the value in NeXT came from Steve Jobs, not NeXT itself.
Taking a long-term view, IG's revenue comes from advertising i.e. it's a one-trick pony, just like Facebook. Apple is a diversified company; even though iPhone makes up >60% revenue, is anyone with an iota of financial sense going to complain that it's a bad thing?
Fun to see how well Amanda Peyton's comment held up.
At times, I just give up on my ability to participate in society because of shit like this.
They'd compare revenue and time since founding to acquisition price, and used it to dismiss the Silicon Valley bubble.
I found the story of Instagram interesting, if you're curious. Link to the "How I Built This" podcast episode on Instagram: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/national-public-radio/how-i...
To be fair though, the minds of Facebook have much more incentive to find a good way to do so than I do
edit: they also had a snapchat clone called, "poke" that too failed. the only reason they got to snapchat was because instagram was so popular and they just went ahead and copied the most popular aspect of snapchat: stories.
Report them for spam. Instagram nukes a lot of them, and either way you end up blocking them.
Yeah, good luck with that. I'm still not following back.
Is a television network worth $100BB? That's what Instagram/Youtube/Netflix etc. are becoming a network of original shows. Of course, Instagram/Facebook are still early so they still look like Youtube in their early days, but they'll all converge to the same point of just outright creating their own original content.
It's one thing to not want one yourself, but to be willfully ignorant about something so simple and publicly visible seems like an odd thing to feel the need to advertise.
Wouldn't the world be a much better place if Facebook had to compete with Instagram? (And Snapchat, and Twitter, and WhatsApp...)
Google acquiring YouTube (good move)
Microsoft acquiring Github (good move)
Yahoo acquiring Tumblr for over a billion (bad move)
Did anybody really think that was a good idea? I personally didn't. Not now, not ever.
The e2e crypto must really kill opportunities to sell data or push ads.
Edit: spelling
:D
Even with professional marketers, total joke and waste of money. People do not click on ads, and those that 'do', might be fake facebook bots or actually facebook messing with numbers.
My new 'ad' is that I make content that people will search for on google. Then they can check out the rest of my website.
I had first-hand evidence of this when my friend fell for some weight loss scam ad of Facebook. We ended up charging it back, and despite all that she’s still not convinced and will happily participate in loyalty schemes, give out personal information to anyone that asks (she literally gets one spam email every few minutes in her Yahoo mailbox) and prefers buying from unknown/shady/scammy sites like Groupon rather than more reputable outlets.
Your "ad" is just content marketing. This difference is you pay with your time (or others time) to create it, rather than paying for it to be put in front of other's eyes.
Why would that ever happen? How could that ever happen? That would destroy everything (note: hyperbole) of value currently offered for free on the internet.
The worth of an ad impression or click is measured in fractions of cents and the adds up to peanuts per month.
Publishers can just charge those peanuts directly and I’ll be happy to pay up (plus they’ll get more without the dozens of middlemen in the advertising/cancer industry).
But seems like publishers are greedy and want more than what the ads pay them, so that’s why subscription-based content sites don’t work at scale. For example, “Le Figaro” (a French newspaper) asks 9€/month for their subscription, despite making less that 1€/month from serving ads to me, so obviously I don’t subscribe and get by with blocking their (really shit, think Outbrain/Taboola “related content”) ads.
On the other hand, I’ve recently started supporting creators on Patreon at the tune of 1$/video. It’s something I can afford to do for every creator I watch, and while being an insignificant amount by itself it would be a significant bag of money should every viewer pay (and definitely more than they can even dream of making from ads).
I like IG, but I dont feel like there are more than a few real people using it.
I don't have an instagram account and have 0 interest in getting one or ever posting anything to it.
I have a few friends that participate in the "influencer scene" (as influencers themselves and as marketing reps at companies who purchase posts from influencers) and it's basically an open secret at this point that aside from a select few celebs, any given influencer has an entire army of bots behind them to promote their posts. Getting on the top of the discover queue is basically just down to who has the bigger bot network.
I saw a hot girl with 1M followers. So I decided to check out her website.
Website looked like a bland woocommerce store, no soul, just the girl selling pictures of her and underwear.
I went to alexa's Site Info and saw her website was ranked top 5 million or something poor. However, her rank in india was top 100k. The girl was not Indian, she had botted/paid so much that her fake traffic was visiting her website more than her real traffic.
I guess I'm thinking I should start botting? I already make an instagram 'like' bot on friday in 60 minutes.
What I'm trying to say is that, like Twitter, IG will probably start to lose a lot of public respect and valuation if they keep boasting "we have 1 billion active users!" once the general public starts to get wind of the fact that the 1 billion number is bullshit.
Take average PE ratios for example, about 15 (so 6.6% earnings as a percentage of market cap).
That would require about $6 per user per year in profit. Facebook is at $6 average revenue per user (ARPU) right now, but >$25 for US users for example, and growing.
Instagrams revenues are currently around $7b with a fraction of that profit, and at current growth rates, the valuation isn't crazy.
If the average user spends 1 hour per day, that's 365 hours per year at $5 or about 1 penny per hour of use. It's not hard to squeeze in a penny worth of profit from ads per hour of use. This would get you at $6b net income. Given that's in the cards for the future, the valuation isn't crazy.
The only flaw investors can make is that growth either isn't sustainable (I think it is for quite some time), or that Instagram users will eventually move on to other things (e.g. Myspace) such that the years of profit will be shortlived (more likely). Nobody invests $100 to gain $5 per year for a short period, that's based on perpetual income expectations which would require Instagram to stay around for quite a long time.
Instagram's innovation strategy is working out nicely > new features are launched, and are loved by it's users.
On top of that they are now also focusing on SMBs (mostly in NBUs) with Whatsapp Business. (That branch could add >100M users)
“In 2018, [Instagram]'s estimated net mobile advertising revenues are projected to reach 6.84 billion U.S. dollars, up from 1.86 billion U.S. dollars in 2016.“
https://www.statista.com/statistics/448157/instagram-worldwi...