Instagram is an advertising bomb is something that has been known for years. However, Facebook has never offered public data that would allow you to know for sure what it means from the total revenue of the company, which generates revenue with Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram and other minor services. Tonight, thanks to Bloomberg, which has significant sources within the financial sector of technology companies, we have learned that Instagram bills $ 20 billion annually, a hugely impressive figure for the comparisons it allows.
Facebook billed in 2019 70.697 million dollars, counting all its platforms. That data is official, but it is not broken down into business units. Thus, knowing this figure, and knowing what Bloomberg gives of Instagram, we can realize that Instagram accounts for more than a quarter of Facebook’s total. Or, if we want to see it another way, Instagram annually generates more revenue than any Facebook in any quarter of the year except in the fourth, when it exceeded 20,000 million.
Another relevant comparison (even if they are not apples with apples) is to face Instagram with YouTube, as in principle “secondary” services in the total advertising revenue of Facebook and Google. A few days ago we could not have made the accounts, because none of the companies officially mentioned them. Still, Google has begun to do so, stating that YouTube generated $ 15.1 billion in the entire fiscal year 2019.
Thus, we can know, provided that Bloomberg’s data on Instagram is accurate, that the social network is 32% larger than the video platform. And it is curious because Instagram does not have the almost monopolistic position of YouTube in its market, although Facebook as a whole does. A more straightforward way to see it, although incorrect in the sense that the numbers do not work like this, is that Instagram could close from September to December, and would match YouTube’s annual accounts.
Instagram accounts for about six times the Twitter turnover
In any case, what these numbers show is that both the one and the other are two of the most profitable technological acquisitions in history since Facebook “only” paid 1,000 million dollars for Instagram at the time. At the same time, Google did the own by YouTube for 1.3 billion (of 2006, yes, whose value was higher).
Both are sufficiently profitable and more than amortized. To compare against other social networks, YouTube is 8.80 times the value of Snapchat, while Instagram is 11 times the value of its old rival of ‘Stories’. Against Netflix, for example, YouTube leaves 25%. However, Instagram exceeds Netflix in annual revenue by 6%.