IGTV launch at an event in San Francisco. Image: Instagram Press
User acquisition rates on Instagram are unparalleled, not just within the Facebook ecosystem, but across the social media industry. Instagram launched Instagram Stories a little less than 2 years ago. Back then, the Instagram user base was around 500 million users. In two years since, Instagram has managed to garner another 500 million users. None of its contemporaries have managed to acquire half a billion users within two years.
It’s no wonder then that Facebook is going aggressive Instagram, and is now pitching it against Google’s YouTube as well, with the launch of the IGTV app. With online video viewing habits undergoing a sea change, there hasn’t really been a proper rival to YouTube which has been around since 2006. Facebook’s multiple attempts at doing video, such as Facebook Live and the more recent Watch, hasn’t really been able to cause any dent in YouTube’s viewership numbers or the user-loyalty on that platform.
Instagram Stories came out of nowhere and left its originator (Snapchat Stories) languishing as far as user growth is concerned, an area where Instagram has shown sustained improvement. Among the current crop of social media apps doing video, Instagram is the only one which can challenge YouTube’s monopoly.
Instagram, which started its journey as a mere image sharing platform, is now even challenging its parent Facebook in the social media game.
A report that came out recently states that if Instagram were a standalone app, it would be valued over $100 billion. While this speaks volumes about Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s vision with regards to Instagram early on — it was bought by Facebook for $1 bn in 2012 — it should also ring some alarm bells at Menlo Park. This is because, Instagram is not just driving away users from rival social media platforms such as Snapchat, Twitter, YouTube, but according to a Pew Research Study, Instagram and YouTube are the most popular apps followed by Snapchat, among teens in the US teens. Also, users are spending on an average the same amount of time on Instagram, as they do on Facebook. A large portion of this population is the same that was once hooked on to Facebook.
When Facebook was on this spree of copying most of Snapchat’s features, it replicated the ‘Stories’ feature across all its four major products: WhatsApp, Facebook, Messenger and Instagram. But the app which gave the most returns was Instagram, which even surpassed the engagement numbers as compared to Snapchat.
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