The History of Instagram

by Megan Arevalo, Guest Contributor

​During the last couple of years, Instagram has managed to grow exponentially, hence becoming one of the world’s most popular image sharing platforms and social media networks.
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For those who do not know, Instagram represents a photography application which Facebook acquired for the whopping sum of $1 billion back in 2012, and which aims at allowing people from all around the world to freely share photos from their personal life, advertise businesses, and even post artistic photos. Regardless of the fact that the app is currently being used by hundreds of millions of people on a daily basis, not many people know how things started out and the history of the platform. This data and more is part of an informative graphic from Website Builder, which explores Instagram’s history and many of its interesting statistics.

Based on this, Instagram was launched back in 2010, by two developers known as Krieger and Systrom, who wanted to release an application that would further facilitate communication in the online environment, with the help of images. In December that year, Instagram managed to hit a whopping 1 million users, thus obtaining an insanely quick growth for an app that was just starting out.
In 2012, the Android app was released, and Instagram’s popularity and profits were growing even faster. Shortly after the Android app was released, Instagram managed to raise around $50 million from venture capitalists, longing for a share of the company. Just a few months later, the company was purchased by Facebook for $1 billion in cash and stock.

After Facebook’s purchase of Instagram, the photo-sharing platform continued to grow, and offer more services. Based on this, in May, ‘Photos of You’ was introduced to the market, in June, video sharing was introduced, whereas in November sponsored and targeted advertising was firstly introduced. A month later, a direct messaging feature was added, and during December, Instagram managed to hit a total of 300 million users.

The year of 2015 introduced 30-second ads for all advertisers and launched ads throughout the world. In the same year, Instagram managed to hit 400 million users. The platform continued to introduce new features, such as switching its feed from chronological order, to best posts first, introducing a new look, offering an instant translation feature, giving users the ability to filter out comment streams, bringing in image zooming, introducing Instagram stories, and last but not least, introducing live video broadcasting a couple of weeks ago. In December 2016, Instagram managed to hit a total of 600 million users, thus marking a new milestone for the photo sharing and social media application owned by Facebook.

While we’re unsure of what the future features that will be released are, we are 100% positive that Instagram can play a great role in shaping someone’s online image, while also helping promote products and services through its innovative ad campaigns, that unlike those on other platforms, are smartly targeted and are backed by better algorithms.
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Based on everything that has been outlined so far, Instagram’s history is quite eventful, and it’s widely believed that its future will be equally eventful, if not even better. ​