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More than 200 million of Instagram’s users have more than 50,000 followers, the level at which they can make a living wage by posting on behalf of brands, according to the influencer analysis company Dovetale.
millions of people and brands have more Instagram followers than the New York Times has subscribers.
In Japan, there is a word for this Instagrammable design movement: Insta-bae (), pronounced “Insta-bye-eh.” The more Insta-bae something is, whether it’s an outfit or a sandwich, the more socially and commercially successful it has the potential to be.
Marissa Mayer, who later became CEO of Yahoo!, to famously test 41 shades of blue to figure out what color would give the company’s hyperlinks the highest click-through rate. A slightly purpler blue shade won out over slightly greener shades,13 helping boost revenue by $200 million a year. Seemingly insignificant changes could make a huge difference when applied to millions or billions of people.
Amazing
Their solution was creative: as soon as a person went to Gmail.com and started entering her username, Google would start downloading the data for her inbox while she typed in her password. Once she clicked to log in, some of her emails would be ready to read, leading to a better user experience without requiring a faster internet connection.
Brilliant solution to a seemingly tricky issue
leadership philosophy: to ask first what problem they were solving, and then to try and solve it in the simplest way possible.
The photos would be square, giving users the same creative constraint for photography as Systrom’s teacher in Florence gave him.
Back at the hotel, he researched online about how to code filters. He played around on Photoshop to create the style he wanted—some heavy shadow and contrast,
They’d borrowed Gmail’s trick, and would start uploading photos while users were still deciding which filter to apply. A lot of the good photo-related startup names were taken, so they came up with “Instagram,” a combo of “instant” and “telegram.”
Soon Bieber was back on the app, continuing to overload Instagram’s infrastructure, to the point where the company had to devote half a server just to his account’s activity.
“If we start proactively reviewing content, we are legally liable for all of it. If anyone found out, we’d have to personally review every piece of content before it goes up, which is impossible.” She was right. According to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act,8 nobody who provided an “interactive computer service” was considered the “publisher or speaker” of the information, legally speaking, unless they exerted editorial control before that content was posted.
(He was partially right. In 2013, venture capitalist Aileen Lee came up with a name for startups with billion-dollar values: “unicorns.” At the time, there were 37.
Zuckerberg understood that the hardest part of creating a business would be creating a new habit for users and a group they all wanted to spend time with. Instagram was easier to buy than to build because once a network takes off, there are few reasons to join a smaller one. It becomes part of the infrastructure of society.
The final cash and stock price Facebook recorded for Instagram is $715 million—not the $1 billion number that made all the headlines.
Facebook automatically cataloged every tiny action from its users, not just their comments and clicks but the words they typed and did not send, the posts they hovered over while scrolling and did not click, and the people’s names they searched and did not befriend.
Everyone at the company had access to the whole Facebook code base and was allowed to make changes to the product without much oversight. All they needed to prove was that their edit caused a boost, however small, for some important metric, like time spent on the app.
Android phones were notoriously more difficult to build for, since they came in different sizes by different manufacturers.
Facebook had copied Snapchat’s functionality but they had failed to copy the app’s cool factor.
In order to launch the advertising business, Instagram had to dodge an uncomfortable reality: advertising agencies hated Facebook. Teddy Underwood, an early Facebook employee who had just transitioned to Instagram to promote its new advertising products, thought the only way to sell them was to make a case that Instagram was the anti-Facebook.
“People who don’t take risks work for people who do,”
The price was a stunning $19 billion. Plus, Koum got a seat on Facebook’s board, and WhatsApp got to stay in its own offices in a nearby town called Mountain View, with about fifty employees who were all now tremendously wealthy.
Moore would pay a paparazzo to wear a green scarf so Hilton would know exactly whose lens to look into when she stepped out of her house, out of a club, or, at one point, out of jail. Then Moore would anonymously broker a deal to sell the picture to a celebrity news site. “Then the publication would come back to us and ask for a comment—and the whole time they had no clue we were behind it,”
Twitter added a re-Vine button, so people could share other people’s Vines in their own feeds. The move had an unexpected side effect, similar to what might have happened to Instagram had they added a re-gram button. Because people could share other users’ content in their own feeds, they no longer had a motivation to attempt time-consuming creative skits. A couple years later, there was little original content production on Vine except from professionals, so those stars realized they had leverage. Twenty of the top Viners banded together to negotiate with Twitter, saying that for about $1
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“Rivalry causes us to over-emphasize old opportunities and slavishly copy what has worked in the past,” venture capitalist and Facebook board member Peter Thiel wrote in his 2014 book Zero to One,
The Instagram team was going to try the opposite: launching Stories, at least a simple version of it, to all 500 million of its users at once. They called it a “YOLO launch,”
Emails were crucial, because Facebook had a tool called Lookalike Audience. When Trump or any advertiser presented a set of emails, Facebook’s software could find more people who thought similarly to the members of the set, based on their behavior and interests.
they found the activity wasn’t nefarious; it was just a sign that people in the country were starting to use Instagram for online shopping. They were posting photos of products for sale,16 then deleting the pictures once they were sold.
“Experiences play into this thirst for content because they are more likely to lead to such stories and pictures than the purchase of a new product would be.9 Even experiences that don’t turn out as expected—say, a long flight delay or rainy football game—eventually turn into shareable stories.”
In 2019, Instagram delivered about $20 billion in revenue,1 more than a quarter of Facebook’s overall sales. Facebook’s 2012 cash-and-stock offer was a historic bargain in corporate acquisition history.
