was launched and currently supports every popular mobile operating system.
History of Instagram
The idea of a startup which will soon become Instagram as we know it belonged to Kevin Systrom. He came up with the idea of using filters to hide imperfections in image’s quality and also with the idea of creating a service to share such photos.
The creation of Instagram was a result of developing another application which was called Burbn. Burbn had the functionality of a social network and allowed to edit photos and check into locations. Systrom, together with Mike Krieger, were developing the platform but it was not popular and could not compete with numerous rivals on the market. In order to become more popular there must be a unique feature and for Burbn that feature was photo filters, which made low-quality pictures look better with applied filters.
In 2010 the development of Instagram has begun and on October 6, the first version of the app was officially released through the Apple Store. On the first night of release it was so popular amongst users that the servers needed additional maintenance so that they would not crash and stop app from working. With time, more members joined the development team: Josh Riedel joined the company as Community Manager, Shayne Sweeney joined in as an engineer, and Jessica Zollman joined as a Community Evangelist. In January 2011 hashtags were introduced to help discovering more photos to Instagram users. In autumn a 2.0 version was rolled out which included new filters, tilt-shifting, high-res photographs and an updated icon. Instagram was growing in popularity but still did not make enough money. For many users it was akin to a game app and was not anything serious.
In spring 2012 Instagram was bought for $1 billion in cash and stock by Mark Zuckerberg. Both Systrom and Krieger are still working on Instagram, however, and do everything to keep their platform growing. A 2.5.0 version was released shortly after acquisition by Facebook and allowed to connect an Instagram account to Facebook profile.
First appearance of ads
It was inevitable to Instagram to include ads sooner or later. After all, it is owned by Facebook which is among the biggest companies whose main source of income is advertising.
In October 2013 ads and monetization were officially announced as a platform’s feature. The announcement did not come as a surprise and in early November to all American users the first advertisement was shown – it was a Michael Kors brand ad. To indicate an ad “Sponsored’ tag was placed at the top right of the image. The ad was being shown to specific users, which parameters coincided with the settings. When publishing an ad on Instagram, user’s age, gender and location can be specified. When user meets all of these specifications he will see an ad post even if he does not follow that advertiser’s Instagram profile.
The first advertisement from luxury designer brand Michael Kors was met with overwhelming negativity which people were expressing in ad’s comment section. They were not just angry; they were outraged by the feature. But the statistics did not show any decline and later on, following Michael Kors’s example, other American brands such as Adidas, Levi’s, Burberry and Lexus were lining up to promote their products on Instagram.
Advertisement development on Instagram
Ever since ads were introduced back in 2013, Instagram has become a popular platform for a myriad of brands. After a while in November 2015 the Instagram’s own API was implemented to find suitable marketing partners for different ventures. Later on the platform was allowed for both small- and big-sized businesses. It took one and a half years for the developers to create a fully functional advertising platform for large brands. The next step was creating a similar plan for other companies as well as further targeting improvements to fulfill all advertisers’ needs.
In advertising, targeting is a form of promotion which advertisers use to target a certain audience which would be more receptive to certain approaches. A user would receive an ad that supposedly would be more interesting to him. An API was later introduced for further expansion of advertiser base, which allowed advertisers to create their own ad campaigns.
At first, it was up for Instagram to decide which brands could advertise on the platform. Brands were selected by a group of experts at the company. Nowadays, it is free to advertise for all users, just like on Facebook.
The new features were also added: “Buy” and “Learn more” buttons helped users to take a closer look at the product in just one click. The new additions assisted to advertisers and boosted their traffic and viewership as well as number of sales, followers etc.
With the enhancement of advertising functionality, it is estimated that in 2017 the Instagram’s global ad revenue will be 5 times more compared to year 2015: from $595 million in 2015 to $2.81 billion in 2017. Even before the advertising update the app saw a significant growth in popularity. According to Instagram itself, a third of all professional advertisers prefer Instagram to promote their products and reach their clients. Other social networks that were popular in the past, such as Snapchat, Pinterest and LinkedIn are now dragging behind Instagram.
The development of official ads on Instagram and new formats of advertising
A first Instagram ad in Russia was launched on September 30, 2015 in cooperation with marketing company AiTarget. Each user would see an ad which included photo, “Sponsored’ tag and additional function buttons. It is only possible to start advertising on Instagram if you have a Facebook account.
There are three actions an advertiser can include to the official Instagram ad:
– Go to advertiser’s website;
– Download the app;
– Watch the video.
Sometimes the advertiser wants to increase following of their profiles, but their ad or the UI is not suited for it.
For example – a Russian banking company Sberbank which promoted their Instagram profile utilized a “Go to advertiser’s website’ function in their ad which included a link to their Sberbank’s official website but only allowed for redirects via web-version of Sberbank app. Without authorizing in the web version of the app it was not possible to follow Sberbank and not everyone is keen to recall and enter their login and password from another app just to follow a company on Instagram. There is also “Open in app’ button in between all those operations, however, it does not always work and additionally may close Instagram even if the app did not open. When testing on Android app this happened almost every time.
More functions and features appeared on Instagram and the visual design was also constantly changing over the time. Ads were changing, too. Advertisers include links to their website, which is an effective and quite common way of generating traffic. Video-ads were introduced lately, and they were even longer than videos from users – 30 seconds instead of regular 15. Nowadays the limits are set at 1 minute for both ads and users’ videos.
Another mean of promotion is by offering an official brand app which is not only suitable for Instagram format, since it is a social network app as well, but may be rather fitting for the advertiser to reach and keep the audience and raise their interest in the brand.
One of the newest formats of advertising on Instagram is carousel-ads, recently it was made available for users from Russia and other countries. You can now add multiple photos in one advertisement post and by swiping them users will interact more with the ad, show more interest and remember the brand better. This method of advertisement is largely adapted by huge companies and established brands who give more extensive reviews of their product and larger overview of their company as a whole.
Finally, Marquee ads are not