When Instagram announced its advertising platform a few years ago, many people were skeptical about the opportunities it presented. Well, those concerns are no longer valid as the company reportedly generated $20 billion in revenue for 2019.
That is a staggering number for the photo-sharing site – even more so when you consider that it was significantly more than the $15.1 billion reported by Youtube for the same period.
To put this into perspective, that is a quarter of the revenue for its parent company, Facebook. When you factor in that Instagram does not have revenue share with the creators, it is very likely that the profit margins are quite healthy.
The company has been working rigorously on making its platform more attractive to advertisers with AR shopping and a whole host of other features. Although Facebook hasn’t officially made an announcement about Instagram’s revenues, it seems that the initial one billion dollars they paid for the service almost a decade ago is going to turn out to be a great investment.