Instagram

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Instagram cofounders Mike Krieger (left) and Kevin Systrom at the Webby Awards, 2012.

Stephen Chernin—Reuters/Alamy

Instagram, online social media platform and social network service for photograph and video sharing. The app was launched in 2010 by cofounders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, and it is now owned by Meta Platforms, Inc., the parent company of Facebook. One of the biggest social media platforms in the world, Instagram surpassed two billion monthly active users in 2022. The company’s headquarters are in Menlo Park, California.

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(Clockwise from left) Kevin Systrom, engineer Shayne Sweeney, and Mike Krieger at Instagram’s office in San Francisco, April 7, 2011.

© Marcio Jose Sanchez—AP/Shutterstock.com

Instagram originated with Stanford graduate Kevin Systrom, who had previously worked at Google. His initial creation was Burbn, so named because of his interest in whiskey and bourbon. Inspired by the popularity of Foursquare and other location-based platforms, Burbn allowed users to post check-ins along with photos, which were not yet a staple of social posting. Systrom secured venture funding for Burbn and went on to recruit fellow Stanford graduate Mike Krieger, who had worked on the social media platform Meebo. They reworked the concept to focus on photographs taken on mobile devices and renamed it Instagram.

Systrom and Krieger embraced minimalism with their prototype, concentrating on images (with the option to add filters), comments, and “liking” features. The duo also decided to eschew a Web version for an iOS app that would capitalize on the much improved photographic capabilities of the iPhone 4. They finalized the app in a few months, posting the platform’s first photos in July 2010. Instagram was released to the public in Apple’s App Store on October 6, 2010, and reached 25,000 users on its first day. Less than three months later it had one million users, a phenomenal achievement.

As Instagram’s popularity grew rapidly, the company drew the interest of various investors and potential buyers. In April 2012, 18 months after its launch, Instagram was bought for $1 billion in cash and stock by Facebook. The acquisition came about a month before Facebook’s initial public offering.

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The social-media platform known as Instagram began as a photo- and location-sharing service called Burbn. Its cofounders, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, sold Instagram to Facebook for $1 billion in April 2012, less than two years after the app first appeared in Apple’s App Store.

© prima91/stock.adobe.com

Instagram’s service is relatively straightforward. It focuses on posts containing images and/or short-form videos. These posts are contained within a user’s profile and may be displayed publicly within Instagram or privately to the user’s followers. There are two main channels for posting: into the user’s permanent feed or into their “Stories,” a special section where content remains for 24 hours before disappearing (unless specifically archived). It is also possible to go “live,” streaming video directly from a camera to the platform.

Users may connect with each other via private message (known as a direct message [DM]), where they can share permanent photos or videos or vanishing photos or videos (similar to Snapchat). Users are able to “follow” each other, with all of the accounts one is following being aggregated into a single feed. The platform also allows for browsing by topic or hashtag, and a user can view a random mix of popular posts.

Instagram includes the ability to take photographs or videos in-app and also to edit new or existing photos or videos with the use of text, gifs, icons, and filters that add various lighting effects, distortions, or other features, including hats or cat ears. Images were originally required to be square, 640 by 640 pixels to fit the width of the iPhone. However, in 2015 size restrictions were expanded to 1080 pixels.

Feed posts may contain a caption from the user, geotagging data, and/or tags linking to other user accounts. Captions frequently feature hashtags to make posts readily findable and searchable by other users. The platform also allows for text comments to be added to feed posts and for users to “like” posts through the use of a heart icon. For Stories, users are able to send emoji-based reactions or reply by private message.

The service is free to use and, similar to sister company Facebook, brings in revenue largely from advertisements. Originally available only on Apple’s iOS, it released versions for Android (2012), Web (2012), Fire OS (2014), and Windows 10 (2016).

The popularity and nature of the service brought many advertisers to Instagram and helped launch the era of the “influencer”—individuals who have built a considerable social media following and use that influence to advertise particular products or services. Influencers are often courted by brands and may receive financial compensation and free products for posting information or reviews or name-dropping a product in their posts or videos.

Although widely lauded for its meteoric rise and extreme popularity, Instagram has come under fire for issues that plague social media platforms: inappropriate content, misinformation and disinformation, and insufficient moderation. Studies have also shown that it can have a detrimental effect on teen mental health, especially impacting the self-esteem of young girls.