Startup Marketing: Analyzing Instagram's Revenue Generation Strategies

This report examines Instagram's successful revenue generation strategies, highlighting its growth since being acquired by Facebook. It emphasizes Instagram's expansion from Android to Windows, its strategic adoption of the storytelling feature (surpassing Snapchat), and its focus on customer maximization. The analysis suggests that new startups can learn from Instagram's approach by understanding and meeting the technological demands of their target audience. By incorporating features like filters, tags, and social media sharing, startups can emulate Instagram's revenue-generating success.

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According to Bloomberg, Instagram is worth more than $100 billion and has increased its
revenue successfully since the company was purchased by Facebook. The startup company
purchased by Instagram can use the procedures followed by Instagram for revenue generation.
Initially, Instagram was only available for people using android application in 2012 but
later it was made available in Windows operating system as well in 2016. This is because there is
large number of customers using Windows operating system. This is a strategy used by
Instagram for gripping a huge customer population that can also be used by the new startup
company for increased revenue generation.
Previously, only Snapchat only had story telling feature that was incorporated by
Instagram but has surpassed Snapchat successfully. As the story telling feature is an added
feature that Instagram offered along with features such as applying filters, organizing tags,
provide location information and sharing content on social media sites such as Facebook, Tumblr
and Twitter, it helped in generating revenue for Instagram. This can also be used by the new
startup company for increased revenue generation (https://www.gadgetbridge.com, 2019).

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Figure 1: Worldwide daily active users of Instagram Stories vs. Snapchat Stories
(Source: https://www.gadgetbridge.com, 2019)
The figure above proves that Instagram has surpassed Snapchat in storytelling feature
offered by both the application. As customer maximization is one of the significant ways of
generating revenue, the new startup company needs to understand the technological expectation
and demands of the generation and offer that successfully (Toosi et al. 2015).

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References
https://www.gadgetbridge.com. (2019). Instagram Stories now has 500 million daily active
users. [online] Available at: https://www.gadgetbridge.com/news/instagram-stories-now-has-
500-million-daily-active-users/ [Accessed 25 Feb. 2019].
Toosi, A.N., Vanmechelen, K., Ramamohanarao, K. and Buyya, R., 2015. Revenue
maximization with optimal capacity control in infrastructure as a service cloud markets. IEEE
transactions on Cloud Computing, 3(3), pp.261-274.