The biggest source of revenue for social networks is usually from sponsored content from advertisers and that is why for the past 5 years or so, they have taken time to come up with solid advertising platforms.
Twitter started monetizing way back and they revealed in their last financial earnings report that they have 130,000 active advertisers on the platform. Facebook on the other hand has a way bigger audience and obviously has way more advertisers (over 2. 5 million as of last count). It has been a point of interest of how many advertisers are on Instagram and the company revealed that on their blog.
According to Instagram, the platform now has more than 200,000 advertisers which is higher than what Twitter currently has. This is impressive since Twitter’s count is from 2010 and Instagram launched their ads platform roughly 2 years ago. The major news on Instagram was made 5 months ago when they opened it to all businesses everywhere and this is what could have catapulted its meteoric rise in advertiser count in a relatively short time. In addition, since Instagram is part of the Facebook ecosystem, it has leveraged on the mother ships advanced advertising platform to grow its advertiser count.
Instagram also took the time to reveal about the effect of the ad platform on its network. Apparently 60% of people who use Instagram learn about products shown on the network and 75% take action like visit the website or shopping. They also gave a case study of a watch company, Shore Projects who thanks to their ads on Instagram were able to grow from their small base in London to shipping all over the world in 100 countries.
You can’t deny Instagram’s rising fortunes in recent times and the nature of its growth is expected to make a healthy percentage of Facebook’s revenues in the future.
