Instagram Emerges From Facebook's Shadow

Instagram Emerges From Facebook's Shadow.

- Benjamin Kerry & Gavin Lenaghan

The social networking portal Instagram first launched in 2010 as a free app for iOS - and, back then, it was clear where Instagram’s focus was. In a post on its Tumblr blog, Instagram enthused that it “makes mobile photos fast, simple and beautiful”. In the years since then, the site has incorporated an increasing number of new features and picked up hundreds of millions of new users along the way. These efforts have culminated in the unveiling of its new long-form video platform IGTV.

HOW INSTAGRAM HAS MUSHROOMED IN POPULARITY

In June, Instagram announced that its tally of monthly active users had reached 1 billion. This places the site in a very exclusive one-billion club that includes WeChat with a billion users, WhatsApp with 1.5 billion and Instagram’s parent company, Facebook, with 2.2 billion. It’s all according to figures shared by Axios, which also observes that Instagram has added about 200 million users even since September. When Facebook acquired Instagram in April 2012, the total stood at 50 million users.

How has Instagram built up such considerable popularity so quickly? For many people, it’s not difficult to discern how. After all, the site has gradually loosened its focus on photo-sharing, allowing its users to share video in a manner that is becoming even more extensive with the introduction of IGTV. While user-shared videos on the network have usually been limited in length to one minute, this maximum length has been extended to an hour for IGTV, making it a YouTube competitor.