Instagram, Apps and 100,000 dollars in advertising every 24 hours.

Instagram. Yes indeed another file sharing, photo sharing, media sharing proposition and App. Like the world needs another App, I hear you groan. Seemingly yes, it does. Badly.

But what makes Instagram different is that it's purely mobile based (and iphone based only with an Android version promised soon). 

What it does is that you upload it to your phone, take a picture and through many different effects, enhance your picture. In particular they create a more "olden times" feel and in some ways create that Kodak nostalgia. You then share those Instagram pics across all accounts, as you do.


If you search it through Google "images", you'll see what I mean and stunning photos a lot of them are. Ideal for Pinterest pinning for example.

Sharing pics is important because as we all share our pics more + more, we want them to look, well, nicer. And it does work, really well, with more and more effects coming along each week.

So this is an applicaton based entirely on Social media activity. Social Media on top of Social Media.

But it's a great story too with the marketing initially driven by celebs (Justin Beiber being the winner as the first to reach 1 million followers last Tuesday. Want to see Justin's pics? Nah, me neither).

Started in March 2010, Instagram raised 500k usd in seed capital and a further round a year later raised another 7 million usd. 'Techcrunch' reports a more recent round raised as much as 40 million usd so it has got its "fans".

In December 2010 (9 months after launch) it had a million users, 10 million by September 2011 and now a reported 25 million users with over 200 million photos downloaded. That's what I said, 200 million. And was Apple's 'App of the year' for 2011.

So a massively succesful App that's only mobile and as yet, only iphone based. Wow.

Which brings me to Apps of which there's 500,000 in the Apple Store and Google with less, but catching. 

Story of the week was of course "Draw Something" a "pictionery interactive" style app launched early in Feb 2012 which has gone straight to the top of the charts.

And not suprisingly.

Yes it's free but revenue is generated from ads on the free version (you can upgrade to a non-ad version) giving a billion impressions a day. And wait for it, the revenue a combination of both ads and upgrades, is a cool, 100,000 usd a day. That's 700,000 usd a week and growing. It became the biggest game on Facebook last week.

Zynga, the biggest social media gaming company in the world) are talked to be a purchaser potentially paying 150-200 million usd. Not bad for an App started in February.

According to 'Techcrunch' (whom we bow at), there's others interested too so the talks have not yet hit that crucial "exclusivity" stage. 

But the point here is that 100,000 usd a day is Ad dollars that would normally have been spent on Tv, Press, Radio, Outdoor.......

One wonders if Ad Agencies had not spent their time more constructively building Apps? 

So ladies and gentlemen, the advertising model is changing.

The world is changing.