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Instagram Is Estimated to Be Worth More Than $100B

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Re: Instagram Is Estimated to Be Worth More Than $100B

#241

Post by fabricexpert »

xkjkls wrote: post #160
samsonradu wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well it might have played differently. If Facebook hadn't bought it then Facebook would have competed against it and that's not an easy fight. Look at Snapchat.

Is Snapchat the best example? Snapchat is getting killed. 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 Insta…

If you're not pushing revenue (i.e. you don't need a sales team, ads team), you probably aren't going to need that many engineers to run something like IG. The original feature set was pretty basic, and it only ran on iOS for quite some time.

Re: Instagram Is Estimated to Be Worth More Than $100B

#242

Post by macintux »

xkjkls wrote: post #144
tomnipotent wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Facebook replacement Instagram has always been supplementary to Facebook, it was never a candidate to replace it.

Yeah, I think given their UI/model it is pretty difficult to have any long form discussion on Instagram. The "news" part of the newsfeed as always been FB's killer app. Or at least that and event planning, though I think it's not impossible for Instagram to develop a product around that.

Interesting, I've found Facebook's event management for large groups to be terrible. Our Jeep group has largely migrated from Meetup to Facebook, and the impact on event coordination has been largely negative.

Re: Instagram Is Estimated to Be Worth More Than $100B

#243

Post by Alex3917 »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #216
Alex3917 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://charlescosta.net/2014/04/how-the-seven-deadly-sins-dr... 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…

Ha, that's a good one! Let other people read your email. LOL. Hypothetically, you would 'reduce friction' by not sending email to the service, instead just give it the keys to your IMAP server! And users wouldn't need to inform people who email them that their email is public, because once it's on their screen they could post a screenshot to the web anyways. ...oh wait, that's a real thing that you did. You just didn…

> Hypothetically, you would 'reduce friction' by not sending email to the service, instead just give it the keys to your IMAP server!

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.

Re: Instagram Is Estimated to Be Worth More Than $100B

#244

Post by nacs »

diminish wrote: post #219

To be contrarian - Facebook is transferring its own user base to Instagram at a quarterly rate which is convenient to shadow Snapchat. The people I see there aren't much different than the ones on FB every month. FB is notifying me that, every single friend on FB is now on Instagram. My likes on Instagram aren't shown to my followers - (I hope ) and that's the main difference which affects my behavior. Likes on insta…

> My likes on Instagram aren't shown to my followers

Your likes actually are shared with your followers.

It's somewhat useful for discovering new accounts but I wish it could be toggled off.

Re: Instagram Is Estimated to Be Worth More Than $100B

#245

Post by Rjevski »

xkjkls wrote: post #221
Rjevski wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is your product that bad that you have to spend millions on ads just to get people interested in it? 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.

Does Coca-Cola suck? They spend billions a year on advertising. Demand for different products is generated very differently depending on the product. Some things travel by word of mouth, some things don't.

Billions a year is their entire advertising budget, and a lot of it is print & TV advertising which is orders of magnitude more expensive than web. Not saying I agree with that either (I wish all advertising would just die in a fire), but it’s not as bad as the above.

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.

Re: Instagram Is Estimated to Be Worth More Than $100B

#246

Post by MisterTea »

admn2 wrote: post #48

I've long had a theory (maybe it's not that revolutionary) that part of Instagram's success is it allowed people a free pass to be vain and show off-y. On Facebook, it was a bit stigmatized to post a picture of an expensive purchase, amazing house interior, fancy vacation, or workout picture of your physique. However, it's the entire point of Instagram. Couple that in with all the brands and other accounts of inspira…

> I've long had a theory (maybe it's not that revolutionary) that part of Instagram's success is it allowed people a free pass to be vain and show off-y.

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.

Re: Instagram Is Estimated to Be Worth More Than $100B

#247

Post by imjk »

nmeofthestate wrote: post #167

I simply do not understand the attraction of Instagram. My brother posts photos on it, and the quality of the pictures is rubbish. They're small, with compression artifacts. The app itself doesn't even let you pinch to zoom without snapping back when you let go (fair enough given how low resolution the pictures are). Obviously I'm looking at this wrong - it's clearly not an app for posting photos, because it sucks at…

I use instagram almost entirely to showcase my photography:https://www.instagram.com/imjustjk/. It's certainly not a perfect platform but it's good enough (and better than most). It's a mobile first platform that's simple, intuitive, and has huge adoption. It also has great loading speed for the amount of content and even the quality of images. I'm not sure what you expect on a mobile app? Do you want to be able to load full 42 megapixels images of mine on your phone?

Re: Instagram Is Estimated to Be Worth More Than $100B

#248

Post by xkjkls »

fabricexpert wrote: post #241
xkjkls wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Snapchat the best example? Snapchat is getting killed. 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 Insta…

If you're not pushing revenue (i.e. you don't need a sales team, ads team), you probably aren't going to need that many engineers to run something like IG. The original feature set was pretty basic, and it only ran on iOS for quite some time.

Yeah, but 7 engineers at that growth rate means your entire team is just going to be devoted to beating all of the scaling fires. That leaves little time for other product improvements that might enable more growth.

FB was pretty slow to monetize Instagram, and they still had hired 100s of people pretty quickly after the acquisition.

Re: Instagram Is Estimated to Be Worth More Than $100B

#249

Post by manigandham »

jmartrican wrote: post #157
vowelless wrote: post #134

I am quite privacy conscious. I have deleted my FB account. On principle, I dislike targeted ads, user tracking, etc. 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.

I'll be honest, I like ads that are relevant to the things I am interested in. I am no FB fan boy, but their ads are pretty good... I actually click on them. What's wrong with that?

Absolutely nothing is wrong with that. That's the ideal of how it's supposed to work.

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.

Re: Instagram Is Estimated to Be Worth More Than $100B

#250

Post by danpalmer »

Rjevski wrote: post #206
cm2012 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because of the amazing data Facebook and Instagram have to create anonymous targeting audiences with. Source: I spend millions on FB and IG ads per month.

Is your product that bad that you have to spend millions on ads just to get people interested in it? 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.

A budget of some number of hundreds of thousands per month is fairly common. People who work on multiple contracts like that are common, so people working on multiple millions of spend per month isn’t a strange thing at all.

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.

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