Notably, Instagram did not invent photo sharing, or photo filters, or even square frames. Instagram’s success was based, in part, on their successful integration and balancing of these elements, but all of them existed at the time in other apps which pre-dated Instagram. The Hipstamatic app, for example, was launched in December 2009 and introduced filters and square frames to iPhone users, and was so successful it was named as one of Apple’s Apps of the Year for 2010. In early 2011, New York Times photographer Damon Winter won a Picture of the Year International prize for images of US troops in Afghanistan that were taken and processed using Hipstamatic’s filters (Winter 2011). The big differences, though, were that Hipstamatic was a paid app ($1.99) and the focus was on the experience of taking and editing a photo, with sharing as secondary (Carter & Maclean 2012). However, on Instagram the social experience – of gaining likes and comments – was central, even if the affordances were largely similar (Vaidhyanathan 2018). While Hipstamatic is still available today, it has a tiny fraction of Instagram’s user numbers. In a bittersweet retrospective interview in 2017, the founders of Hipstamatic noted that their app had a ‘major role to play in the very existence of Instagram’ (Downs & Koebler 2017). Nor was Hipstamatic the only competing app that Instagram had to contend with when it launched.
While Instagram had initially courted iPhone users with their higher quality cameras, PicPlz had gone in the other direction, launching in May 2010 with an Android app, with filters, and which was integrated with Twitter and Foursquare from initial release. Showing a fairly public lack of faith in Instagram, Andreessen Horowitz, one of the two initial investors in Instagram when it was still Burbn, very publicly backed PicPlz with a more significant investment (Swisher 2013). While PicPlz thrived for a time, including releasing an Apple version of the app, it was ultimately Instagram that thrived and PicPlz completed shut down after losing most of its users by July 2012.
Another early investor in Instagram, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, made no secret that he was interested in Instagram coming under the Twitter umbrella. Instagram allowed users to cross-post images directly to Twitter where the full image would appear in the Twitter timeline in a reduced size form. This initial integration added much needed visual content to Twitter, but also greatly increased Instagram’s visibility in its early days. Dorsey offered a US$500 million deal to Systrom and Krieger, but was turned down after the company successfully received a further US$50 million from investors. While Systrom also let Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg know Instagram was not on the market, Zuckerberg instead doubled the Instagram offer, with a US$1 billion dollar deal which proved enough to see Instagram become entirely Facebook owned (Shontell 2013). At the time of its sale, Instagram was 18 months old, the company had 13 employees, 30 million users (all on iPhones) and an Android version of the app was only a week old.
Facebook Purchase
In April 2012, Facebook announced that they had signed a US$1 billion deal to buy Instagram (Facebook 2012). There was an immediate backlash from Instagram users who feared that the app would be dismantled or become another extension of the main Facebook site. Attempting to reassure those users, in their official press release Facebook stated:
we need to be mindful about keeping and building on Instagram’s strengths and features rather than just trying to integrate everything into Facebook. That’s why we’re committed to building and growing Instagram independently. Millions of people around the world love the Instagram app and the brand associated with it, and our goal is to help spread this app and brand to even more people. (Facebook 2012).
On Instagram’s blog, Kevin Systrom noted that he and Mike Krieger would continue, as Facebook employees, to helm Instagram, emphasizing that their app would remain unique: ‘We’ll be working with Facebook to evolve Instagram and build the network. We’ll continue to add new features to the product and find new ways to create a better mobile photos experience. The Instagram app will still be the same one you know and love’ (Systrom 2012). Thus, despite the intense user backlash when it was first announced, the purchase of Instagram by Facebook became less and less visible, less and less remembered, to the extent that by 2018 surveys suggested that less than half of Americans even knew that Facebook owned Instagram (DuckDuckGo 2018).
While US$1 billion may not seem an enormous sum in light of Instagram’s subsequent growth, it is important to remember that at the time Facebook purchased the company, they had no business model and had not made a single cent of revenue. While it may be hard to remember an Instagram without ads, the platform did not start experimenting with advertising until late 2013, and only rolled out its advertising tools globally, and opened it to all businesses, in September 2015. Of course, as users with significant Instagram followings started to attract sponsorship and advertising outside of the platform’s tools, the transparency of the commercial dealings of Influencers led to Instagram adding a ‘Paid Partnership with’ tag in mid-2017 so that all paid, promoted and endorsed content could be clearly marked, as is explored in chapter 5.
The purchase of Instagram by Facebook did not help relationships with other social media companies, though, especially Twitter. In June 2012, as part of wider changes to third-party access, Twitter blocked the ability for Instagram users to ‘find friends’ who they were connected to on Twitter (Robertson 2012). Six months later, Twitter also removed the ability for Instagram images to appear in the main Twitter timeline (D’Orazio 2012). Where Instagram images had previously been embedded in Twitter, the changes meant that posts could now only appear as a link which needed to be clicked and opened in another program – a browser or app – in order to see the image. These changes showed further antagonism between Twitter heads and Instagram’s new owners, Facebook, and that relationship has never really mended.
Instagram’s purchase by Facebook should not be understood just as eclipsing a rival platform before it grew too large. Nor should it be understood simply as Facebook trying to become a bigger player in the visual social media stakes. Importantly, perhaps most importantly, Facebook also acquired all of the underlying Instagram user data from the date of purchase onward. The data generated by taking a photograph, and the metadata (data about that photo) generated by the mobile device taking the photo, and added manually by the user in terms of tagging people, locations, adding hashtags, or simply in the image’s captions, all add to the usefulness of the image as a datapoint that can be added to, compared with, and analysed as part of other data points (Vaidhyanathan 2018). As social media scholar and critic Siva Vaidhyanathan (2018, p. 55) warns, ‘Facebook has grown into the most pervasive surveillance system in the world. It’s also the most reckless and irresponsible surveillance system in the commercial world.’ As a jewel in Facebook’s suite of apps and offerings, Instagram is part of the Facebook empire, and the personal data of Instagram’s users is subject to the same conditions, uses, analyses and potential misuses as any other Facebook user (whether or not an Instagram user actually has a separate Facebook account). Moreover, subsequent changes to Instagram, which saw users encouraged to return to the platform more and more, should also be understood as part of the larger Facebook strategy of ‘keeping more people interacting with Facebook services in different ways to generate more data’ (Vaidhyanathan 2018, p. 39).
Despite now being Facebook employees, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger worked hard as Instagram’s Heads to ensure that the platform did not get thought of as Facebook. Even as data, practices, policies and employees fell under a single umbrella, the upbeat public face of Instagram was distinct, colourful and a long way from the Facebook mothership. Instagram continued