How Instagram rose into a cultural powerhouse
Instagram boomed with help from technological advances and societal changes
When Justin Bieber posted on Instagram for the first time in July 2011, he did not enthrall his army of fans with a shirtless selfie or a meticulously planned photo shoot.
He just wanted to complain about traffic in Los Angeles.
Out of focus. Mundane scenery. Not particularly artful. No matter. These were the early days of Instagram, before smartphones included cameras that could produce higher quality images than the pointand-shoots of yore.
Most celebrities now, some with tens of millions of followers, put far more care into what goes on the platform. Instagram has become central to their public images. The same goes for teenagers who just want to look cool, as well as everyone in between.
Before resigning on Monday, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, Instagram’s cofounders, presided over a company that grew into a cultural powerhouse. Along the way, they got help from technological advances and societal changes that demanded an app like Instagram.
Instagram was founded in 2010, but initially focused on location check-ins as an app called Burbn. Krieger and Systrom noticed that early Burbn users were heavily using the app’s photo features, so they retooled it around sharing photos and changed the name.
It was, in many ways, the perfect time to release a photo-sharing app. Flickr, which had once dominated web-based photo sharing, was on the decline. Apple unveiled its iPhone 4, which had a five-megapixel camera, then considered a major leap. Anyone with less of a camera could apply Instagram’s easy-to-use filters to obscure any graininess.
Within hours of Instagram’s release, thousands of people had downloaded it. It passed one million users about two months later. In 2012, it had 40 million users. Now more than one billion people use it, and analysts expect continued growth.
Eighteen months after Instagram arrived, Facebook bought it for an eye-popping $1 billion. Bloomberg Intelligence recently valued it at 100 times that figure.
Instagram’s concept was simpler than those of competing social networks. It offered a stream of photos — and later videos — that were more often than not pleasant or artful. There were no heavy news stories or invitations to download new apps mucking up feeds. As cameras improved in smartphones, so did users’ desire to share their photos. Instagram has weathered a challenge from its upstart rival Snapchat, partly by mimicking Snapchat’s popular Stories feature, which displays photos for 24 hours before they disappear.
Critics say Instagram offers a carefully staged version of everyone’s best life — which, in turn, can inspire nagging feelings of envy, or exhaustion at keeping up a facade, or a crushing need for approval, or a thirst for realness. On the other hand ... doesn’t this brunch look great? Isn’t this dog perfect?
For all the behaviours it inspires, the app has remained a primary way to keep in touch with friends, and maybe kill a minute or two in the line at the grocery store. It even works as a dating app. While the growth was driven by everyday users, much of the app’s cultural clout comes from its utility to celebrities, who also have quite an interest in putting their best foot forward.