Ad war in planet of the apps

Founders of Instagram and Whatsapp vote with their feet as Mark Zuckerberg seeks to squeeze apps for more revenue

When it first burst onto the scene in 2010, Instagram was a revelation. The app let iphone users not only share their pictures but add clever filters at the touch of a button. Suddenly everyone could be Obie Oberholzer, the photographer whose richly coloured images are artistic genius.

Last month the co-founders, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, left in a huff. We don’t know the details, but the broad strokes are: Systrom and Krieger grew their user base at a fantastic rate after launching. Two years later Facebook founder and CEO

Mark Zuckerberg arrived with a $1bn payday and catapulted them into the stratosphere.

Now, with more than 1-billion users, Instagram has outperformed Facebook’s expectations — and inadvertently created a catch-all net for the hordes of youngsters quitting Facebook itself. Instagram is Facebook’s fastest-growing source of revenue and its silver bullet.

But Facebook’s waning attraction for younger generations is posing an existential threat to the 2.2-billionuser platform, the greatest communication network the world has seen.

Jan Koum and Brian Acton, the cofounders of Whatsapp — also a Facebook property — have left as well. Whatsapp and Instagram are going through a crisis of confidence, and radical changes are afoot. If the founders are to be believed, these changes will define a new era for the apps and their users. The changes could also be destructive, Koum,

Acton, Systrom and Krieger seem to be saying by deciding to quit.

Systrom and Krieger say they are “taking … time off to explore our curiosity and creativity again”. Zuckerberg says they are “extraordinary product leaders and Instagram reflects their combined creative talents”.

There’s much Kremlinology going on, trying to read and interpret these signs. Let’s cut to the chase: Facebook wants to make more money from Instagram and catch all those pesky kids who don’t want to play ball on Facebook itself. Enter more aggressive monetisation, or, simply put, more advertising. We don’t know what that’s going to look like but it’s looking so bad the founders have left.

To call the founders of an app that has 1-billion users “product leaders” is being interpreted as the ultimate putdown in Palo Alto.

The glory days of the Instagram we know may well be over.

Meanwhile, advertising is coming to Whatsapp, if the rumours are to be believed. That’s likely as Facebook looks to monetise the app which is used to send 60-billion messages a day.

Facebook is recovering from its latest shocking data breach that affected 50-million users. What it doesn’t need is for its crown jewel, Instagram, to be plunged into crisis while the mother ship tries to put its problems to bed. It isn’t going to be pretty, however many filters you apply.

Facebook wants to catch all those pesky kids who don’t want to play ball