Instagram is a popular photograph-sharing and social media mobile application that was launched in October 2010. Designed for smartphones and tablets, it enables users to post, edit, and share photos, videos, and short clips known as reels. The app quickly gained traction, reaching over one million users within two months and approximately two billion monthly users by May 2024. Developed by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, Instagram was initially focused on mobile photography, with its name reflecting its roots in instant sharing and communication.
Over the years, Instagram introduced various features to enhance user experience, including filters, Stories, and shoppable tags for marketing purposes. Despite its success, the platform has faced scrutiny regarding its impact on mental health, particularly among young users, with studies suggesting it can negatively affect body image and self-esteem. As competition has increased from platforms like TikTok, Instagram has adapted by launching new features and services, including the text-based app Threads in July 2023. This evolution reflects Instagram's ongoing effort to remain relevant in the rapidly changing social media landscape while catering to a diverse global audience.
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Instagram is a photograph-sharing and social media mobile application (app) for smartphones and tablets that launched in October 2010. The app allows users to post photos, videos, and short clips known as reels; the app also allows users to make various types of edits on their videos and photos. Users can repost content from Instagram onto other social media services such as Facebook and X (formerly Twitter).
Instagram rapidly grew in popularity after its launch, gaining more than one million users within two months of its launch. Within four years, that number reached approximately two hundred million active monthly users and twenty billion photos shared. By May 2024, according to the data-reporting software company Demandsage, the app had approximately 2 billion monthly users worldwide, making it one of the world's most popular social media platforms. It remained in intense competition with other social media companies throughout the early 2020s, and in July 2023 launched Threads, a text-based social media platform intended to compete directly with X.
Early History
Software engineer Kevin Systrom developed the basis of Instagram while attending Stanford University in Stanford, California. After working a day job, Systrom learned how to code and built a HyperText Markup Language (HTML) prototype app called Burbn. This app allowed users to check in at locations, make plans, and earn points for hanging out with other users and posting pictures.
At a party, Systrom met backers from venture capital investment firms Baseline Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz. Two weeks after meeting with these investors, Systrom had raised $500,000. Engineer Mike Krieger was brought on as a partner, and a team of other engineers was assembled.
Systrom and Krieger decided that if they wished to establish themselves as a legitimate company among the many other app developers, they would have to focus on their app performing one task very well. They chose to focus on the mobile photograph aspect of Burbn and spent eight weeks developing a new photography app, which they called Instagram, a combination of the words "instant" and "telegram."
After beta-testing and fixing some malfunctions of the app, Instagram was launched on October 6, 2010. Within hours, over ten thousand users had downloaded the app and by the end of the first week, it had over 100,000 downloads. By the end of 2010, over a million users were using the app. In February 2011, Instagram was valued at $20 million and was receiving a great amount of media coverage.
Investors continued to finance Instagram, and in April 2012 the company Facebook, later renamed Meta, acquired the company for $1 billion in cash and stock. In 2014, Instagram was reported to be growing faster than all other leading social media services.
Overview
For several years, Instagram went through only slight changes in its features. Users could take a photograph, add a filter to it to give it a desired effect, share it, and "like" and comment on other users’ photographs. In June 2014, the app added ten new features so that users could modify their photographs even further.
These additional features allowed users to adjust the contrast, brightness, and saturation of their photographs. In August 2014, Instagram introduced the Hyperlapse app, which allows users to post time-lapse videos. In subsequent years, Instagram continued to tweak its photo customization tools, giving users more options.
In August 2015, through the company blog, Instagram announced its biggest change up until that point: support for the posting of images in a format other than square. Despite the app's beginnings as a program dedicated to preserving the nostalgia of the historical square photograph format, the company acknowledged that a large number of photos are rectangular, causing frustrated users to turn to outside apps to format for posting. With this change, users can share both photos and videos in portrait and landscape orientation. Just as Facebook had changed its "feed" method in 2009, Instagram also followed suit in March 2016 and began testing an algorithm that arranges items in a user's feed according to photos users would most want to see based upon who they follow rather than in reverse chronological order. In further recognition of such transformations, the app instituted another large and controversial alteration only weeks later when it presented a new logo. The company replaced its iconic retro camera logo with a more modern pink, purple, and orange logo, which a spokesperson explained is meant to capture the "diverse storytelling" for which the app has come to serve as a platform. These changes were met with mixed reviews from users and commentators.
After its launch, Instagram users quickly adapted the use of hashtags to enhance their photograph commenting. The hashtag is a word or words grouped together without spaces and prefixed with the hash (#) symbol. Users can then search for the hashtag on various social media networks and find posts concerning the topic.
One of the most popular hashtags used on Instagram became #selfie, a term for when people use their smartphone’s camera to photograph themselves. By December 2014 more than 200 million photos on Instagram were tagged "#selfie." The Oxford English Dictionary even named "selfie" its 2013 word of the year. Numerous studies have been undertaken concerning their effect on ego and self-image. For example, some believe that since Instagram is image-driven, it can have a negative effect on self-esteem when users do not "like" a person’s selfie. Numerous celebrities began using Instagram, and many of them took frequent selfies, which some attributed to the rise in the hashtag’s popularity. Celebrities commonly use their accounts to offer a glimpse into their private lives, communicate with fans, and promote causes they support.
As Instagram grew in popularity through the early 2010s, other popular hashtag trends emerged, such as #TBT, an abbreviation for "Throwback Thursday." Using this hashtag, users post old photographs of themselves. Posting baby photographs is a popular practice with this hashtag. Other frequently used hashtags on Instagram include #WCW ("Woman Crush Wednesday," in which users post photographs of women they admire), #MCM ("Man Crush Monday," in which users post photographs of men they admire), and #blessed, in which users post photographs of people or things for which they feel grateful.
In 2016 Instagram introduced the ability to create Stories, collections of photos and videos that expire after a day. This functionality is similar to that of the app Snapchat, one of Instagram's competitors. The feature quickly became popular; Instagram stated in 2017 that over 250 million people used Stories every day.
Many major brands also use Instagram for marketing purposes. Retailers, restaurant chains, and sports teams are examples of some of the types of brands that widely use Instagram to market themselves. Ways of marketing that have been embraced on Instagram include posting behind-the-scenes photographs, holding contests in which users are asked to repost photographs and hashtags, promoting new products, and displaying customers using their products. In 2016, Instagram began adding "shoppable tags," small icons of a shopping bag appearing on advertising posts that users can click to find out how to buy products depicted in that post, to posts made by a small number of corporate partners. Use of shoppable tags expanded over the next several years, and in 2018 they were introduced into Stories. As more brands began to rely on influencer marketing in the late 2010s and early 2020s, Instagram became a popular marketing platform for both large corporations and small businesses.
As it grew in popularity, Instagram also made an impact on the world of photography. It widely popularized the art of photography and exposed people who did not regularly take photographs to it. While some have seen this as a positive movement, some professional photographers have expressed the belief that Instagram has undermined the true art of photography and created a homogenized brand of photograph.
By the late 2010s, as more research emerged regarding the connection between social media use and mental health, Instagram and other social media companies came under scrutiny. In May 2017, a survey of nearly fifteen hundred people between the ages of fourteen and twenty-four, conducted by the UK Royal Society of Public Health, found that of all social networking apps, Instagram was the most detrimental for young people's mental health. The survey, called #StatusofMind, reported that Instagram negatively affected body image (especially among young women) and sleep patterns and contributed to "fear of missing out," or FOMO, a term coined by Patrick McGinnis in 2004. The author of the survey report, Matt Keracher, noted that young women who use Instagram are more driven to "compare themselves against unrealistic, largely curated, filtered and Photoshopped versions of reality." In response, the report called for social media platforms to identify images that have been digitally altered. Despite these negative effects, however, the survey also found that Instagram had a positive effect on self-expression and self-identity for many of those surveyed.
In the early 2020s, Instagram remained one of the world's leading social media platforms but faced increasing competition in the US and internationally from TikTok, a Chinese social media platform that allows users to post short videos. In 2021 TikTok reached 37.3 million US users that fell into the Generation Z age range, compared to Instagram's 33.3 million users in the same age bracket. To compete with TikTok, Instagram launched its Reels feature in 2020, which allowed users to post and edit fifteen-second short videos, which played on a loop. This format mimicked the style of videos found on TikTok.
Instagram made other changes to the platform around this time, which some users and observers felt were intended to compete directly with TikTok. For example, in mid-2022 Instagram modified how the app's algorithm worked; this change resulted in many users seeing videos and other content from "recommended" accounts instead of photos and videos from people they knew and accounts they followed. By July 2022 this change had provoked a harsh backlash from many users, which resulted in the company pledging to reduce the extent to which users saw recommended videos.
In 2022 Google revealed that its own data indicated that many younger users had begun using TikTok and Instagram as a search engine. This development led Google, one of the world's leading search engines, to begin viewing Instagram and other social media platforms as potential competitors.
Meanwhile, Instagram continued to adapt to increased competition from TikTok, X, and other social media platforms. In July 2023 Instagram launched Threads, which was intended to compete directly with X by allowing users to post text totaling up to five hundred characters and share pictures and videos. Meta, which owned Instagram and was formerly known as Facebook, designed Threads as a "text-based conversation app;" this focus on text-based posts marked a drastic departure from Instagram's original focus on photo and video content. In some ways this imitated the format of X, though Threads initially did not have a function that allowed users to directly message each other.
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