Blog: Instagram - Page 5

Instagram has announced the launch of ads in Stories. Stories are a feature pinned at the top of Instagram’s user feed, enabling them to showcase and browse photos and videos of other users. Instagram Stories is infamous for being heavily inspired by Snapchat’s features.

Yesterday Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg finally confirmed that Facebook is a media company , not a traditional one, but a media company nonetheless. This is something we've been thinking about a lot at MIDiA, so much so in fact that we have just publishedan entire report on the subject: "Facebook The Media Company: If It Looks Like A Duck" The report forms part of MIDiA's new Paid Content service, which we will be telling you more about early in the new year.

Snapchat is gearing up for its IPO which, if successful, could provide enough capital to finalize the company’s pivot from a trendy social messaging app into a full-fledged mobile platform. With new capital Snapchat will be able to compete much more effectively with Facebook.

Despite an audience both of huge scale and engagement (150m Daily Active Users), this is an uncertain time for Snap Inc. Though they have impressively manoeuvred away from their original incarnation as the alternative ephemeral image-messaging app towards building an impressive advertising model of discover channels and sponsored lenses, the company will be fully aware that in order to safeguard their lucrative prospective IPO (presently valuing the company at $25 Billion), they must preserve anarrative of continual growth if they areto acquiesce with Wall Street demands of tech stocks.

Yesterday’s announcement of the death of Vine is a stark reminder of just how fickle the video app landscape is and underlines just how important vision is in acquisition strategy for tech companies.

One of the themes my MIDiA colleague Tim Mulligan (the name’s no coincidence, he’s my brother too!) has been developing over in our online video research is that of next generation TV operators. With the traditional pay-TV model buckling under the pressure of countless streaming subscriptions services like Netflix (there are more than 50 services in the US alone) pay-TV companies have responded with countless apps of their own such as HBO Go and CBS All Access.

Music messaging apps are one of the most exciting and disruptive music consumer behaviours to emerge since file sharing first raised its head in the late 1990s. Apps like Musical.ly and Dubsmash have catalyzed entirely new ways for young music fans to engage with music, blurring the lines between creator and audience.

So something remarkable happened at this year’s Grammys awards. Not the who, where orwhat about the winners of the world’s most prestigious music awards ceremony. Something far more profound for the future of content discovery and consumption occurred.

Instagram started testing a functionality that allows switching seamlessly between multiple accounts on mobile. While this might sound like a minor improvement for most casual single-account users, the move directly caters to the demographic segment, which plays a key role in Instagram’s monetization strategy – the super creators, or those with multiple accounts.

Facebook has 1.4 billion monthly active users, up by 58% since Q3 2013. Quite simply, Facebook is big and is getting bigger. But the metrics only tell part of the story. Since its inception in 2004 as a networking tool for college kids, Facebook has gone on to become one of the true internet giants.

Facebook released a Chat SDK to a limited group of developers allowing them to build official bots on Messenger. When users message these ‘official accounts’, bots can immediately reply with further product information, pricing, location, buy buttons etc.

Facebook has launched app notification aggregator Notify. It allows users to follow a range of categories or ‘stations’ and receive notifications with relevant content from a large array of content publishers.

GIFs have been around since 1987, Vine popularised the feature case for super-short form content in 2013, but in the last few months it’s been raining super-short form innovation. Recent announcements include iOS Live Photos, Facebook’s GIF profile pictures, Disney Gif or Instagram’s Boomerang, to name a few.