The first in our series of articles looking at Social Media of Today
How did Instagram get to where it is today
The photo sharing app Instagram was first launched for Apple's iOS in October 2010 by computer programmer Kevin Systrom and software engineer Mike Krieger. The name Instagram comes from merging ‘instant camera’ and ‘telegram’, and as a brand that is now well-known globally.
The app was born after development of a mobile check-in product worked on by Systrom and Krieger, ‘Burbn’. This product was more complex and allowed users to do a number of things such as check into locations, post photos and hang out with friends, in order to earn points. Realising that users wanted a less complicated experience and that the product was similar to Foursquare, another location-based product, the pair slimmed down the app to focus just on photo-sharing. The idea to add filters to the app arose following a holiday Systrom took with his girlfriend. Put off by the quality of the photos taken on an iPhone 4 camera, his girlfriend was opposed to posting them. This led Systrom to introduce filters to the app, to improve the look of each photo so that it was ready to be shared.
After gaining immediate popularity following its launch, with a million users registrations recorded within the first two months, Instagram continued to grow - by the end of year one, ten million users had registered.
Initially, Instagram was only available to iPhone users. An Android version of the app was released in April 2012, opening the platform to the majority of smartphone users. This Android version of the app was downloaded over one million times on the first day.
Soon after this, noticing its increasingly popularity, Facebook (the company known as Meta) acquired Instagram outright, paying with a mixture of cash and stocks totalling US $1 billion. Systrom and Krieger remained in their positions as CEO and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) following the sale.
A limited desktop interface, allowing users of PCs and other desktop computers to view and comment upon posts on Instagram, but not to create their own, was launched in November the same year.
In June 2013, just a year after being acquired by Facebook, Instagram announced a significant new feature: the facility for users to create and edit videos from 3-15 seconds in length. This move was perhaps made in a bid to compete with the short-form video-sharing app Vine (acquired by Twitter - now X - in 2012), with Instagram offering longer video clips and more features than Vine did, including thirteen new filters designed specifically for video.
In October 2013 Instagram finally announced it would start to monetise the platform, which until that point had yet to make a profit. Users in the US could expect to see ads appearing in their photo streams within a few short months. The roll-out of advertising was stepped, initially involving just a small number of businesses. Ads became available to a number of major brands, including (in the UK) Waitrose, Channel 4, Cadbury and Sony Music, in September 2014, before the paid advertising became universally available in September 2015.
In December 2013, Instagram released a new feature called Instagram Direct. This addition gave users the ability to send a photo or video privately to someone who followed them via a direct message. You could also send content to someone who didn’t follow you, but that user would first have to agree to view the message before it was visible. It was soon possible to add a small amount of text with the private photo. This move was Instagram staking their claim in the direct messaging platform arena, where WhatsApp and Snapchat already offered popular similar services.
Five years after its launch, Instagram made the decision to update the look and feel of the app. This update saw a new icon introduced, with a pink/purple gradient background and much simpler icon of a camera replacing the older style, more realistic brown camera, along with in-app changes - removing colour in favour of a black and white interface that gives a more modern and minimal feel. When questioned about the reasons for the redesign, Instagram’s Head of Design rather tersely explained: “When Instagram was founded over five years ago, it was a place for you to easily edit and share photos. Over those five years, things have changed.” He went on to affirm that “Instagram is now a diverse community of interests where people are sharing more photos and videos than ever before.”
In August 2016, Instagram launched Instagram Stories, allowing users to post photos and videos that disappear after 24 hours. This was widely perceived as a response to the growing popularity at the time of Snapchat, in which temporary content that self-deletes within a short period had become standard.
Instagram to that point had been a permanent gallery giving a view into the lives of its users, who would generally only post their best photographs and videos – in other words, the curated highlights of the visual content they had produced.
Instagram Stories opened the floodgates for users to post more unpolished content, on a more frequent basis, on what for many had become their favourite social media platform. The commercial aim here was clear: to arrest the flow of Instagram users to Snapchat. Whatever temptations Snapchat may have held, Instagram wanted to match them so that its users would not be lured away to its popular younger rival. Making Snapchat-style features available to Instagram users in the place where they already had most of their image content proved a successful move.
The Stories feature on Instagram works by allowing the user to take a photo or a video of up to ten seconds in length using the app, or select one they had recorded earlier. Initially, it was only allowed to use photos or videos timestamped within the past 24 hours. This helped to prove the genuine newness and freshness of content posted via Stories, so that followers were assured that they were not viewing recycled old footage. However, this time-limit no longer exists, and users can nowadays add photos or videos created at any time.
Stories users can then add filters, text, emojis or even free-hand drawings to their posts. Once story slides have been created, there is an option to save before posting (but it is also allowed to save after posting if you did not beforehand). The ‘story’ is then posted for followers to view. They can navigate it by tapping on the right side of the screen in order to skip ahead to the next slide, or on the left side to go back. They can also pause the animation of the visual content by holding the screen; and they have the option to leave a comment on a story by swiping the screen of their device, if they are browsing with a touch-screen mobile device.
Instagram Stories appear in circles at the top of the app, so they are immediately visible when you open it. Other features allow you to see who has viewed your ‘story’, and even to view those of people that you do not regularly follow so long as their profile is set to ‘public’.
A further important feature now taken for granted was added to Instagram in February 2017. This date saw the launch of carousel posts, which initially allowed users to post up to ten photos or videos within a single post, where previously they had been limited to just one piece of visual content per post. This feature was updated in August 2024 to extend the allowance to twenty images or videos in a post.
Instagram has continued to evolve since then, although not every newly added feature has been permanently retained. June 2018 saw the launch of IGTV, a platform oriented around longer video content. It gives most users the option to add videos of up to ten minutes in length. Users with larger followings, however, are given the special privilege of being allowed to upload videos of up to one hour. This feature was less successful than anticipated, leading to Instagram removing the IGTV feature and tab from the app in October 2021, just three years after its launch.
To assist in monetising the platform, and perhaps also to compete for market territory with eBay, Gumtree, Etsy and other popular online trading platforms, in May 2019 Instagram launched another new feature called ‘Shops’. This offers an in-app storefront allowing purchases to be made. Consumers are charged the prices advertised, while the businesses who list their wares are charged a transaction fee on the value of the sale through the platform. Instead of being directed to a trader’s independent website to complete their purchases, customers are invited to securely enter their payment details, complete the purchase and manage the order directly in the app. This makes the process very similar to that on eBay, and limits or prevents the loss of Instagram traffic to external websites.
In August 2020, another new feature, Instagram Reels, was launched. This was described as ‘a new way to create and discover short, entertaining videos’. Reels was widely perceived as a bid to compete with the fast-growing short-form video-sharing platform TikTok. Initially, the time limit for videos added over Reels was strict, capped at just fifteen seconds. This contrasted markedly with the generous ten-minute offering of IGTV. Since IGTV was removed from Instagram, the time allowance for Reels videos has been increased - as of January 2025, it is three minutes – still only three tenths as long as the allowance on IGTV had been, but much more flexible than fifteen seconds. Reels users can add multiple separately-recorded video clips to a single reel, stitch them together, and add visual effects and audio. Scrolling through short, entertaining videos has become a somewhat addictive pastime for many users of the app.
But even Reels was not the last new feature to be added to Instagram by its parent company Meta, whose developers held nothing back in their desire to continue to innovate and respond to market trends in their ongoing development of the much-loved app. In July 2023, Instagram branched out in the direction of non-visual content for the first time, with the launch of Threads, a purely text-based discussion platform. This new sub-platform, which an existing Instagram account was required to use, gained 100 million users in its first week of operating; and although there were initial doubts that the momentum behind Threads could be sustained after the novelty value wore off, its user base had tripled by December 2024 to 300 million monthly active users. Originally dubbed as an alternative to X, and perhaps expected if not directly designed to attract refugees from the former Twitter following its take-over and rebranding, the Threads platform has continued since its launch to roll out new and improved features designed to make it more attractive and appealing to users.
It is worth pointing out that although Threads presents as though it were a standalone app, it is in fact inextricably connected to Instagram - you cannot create a Threads account without already owning a registered Instagram account. The link and seamless integration by design mean that you can easily import details of the accounts you already follow on Instagram to your Threads account, and thus automatically follow then on Threads too. It is also easily possible to share any post you make on Threads post to an Instagram ‘story’. Posts on Threads can be up to 500 characters long, which is a significantly more generous allowance than the traditional limit on Twitter / X, allowing adequate space to relate a relatively nuanced or complex narrative to your audience. This is still a much tighter character limit than the long-established open-ended allowance on Facebook (which of course is also owned by Meta). Other features of Threads include the creation of custom feeds, topic tags (similar to hashtags, but you can only select one per post), and options to schedule and edit posts, and to add animated GIFs and polls. There is also now a web version of the app available.
A recent update to the Instagram user interface was made in January 2025. This changed the well-established look of Instagram profiles, removing the traditional square display of uploaded photographs and switching to a rectangular one. The reason behind this change was stated by Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri in these terms: “I know some of you really like your squares. And square photos are sort of the heritage of Instagram. But at this point, most of what’s uploaded, both photos and videos, are vertical in their orientation.” The change makes sense in terms of reducing the need for photo cropping, but seems to mark the end of an era for the original design values of this much-loved platform.
Globally, Facebook also remains the market leader, totalling 3.07 billion users across the world. Instagram comes in third with 2 billion users, beaten into second place by video-sharing platform YouTube, which has 2.5 billion users. Following these, Meta-owned messaging app WhatsApp is placed fourth, Chinese-owned short-video-sharing app TikTok comes in fifth, Chinese messaging app WeChat is placed sixth, and Meta-owned messaging app Facebook Messenger is seventh.
