Thursday, September 6, 2012

Facebook Buying Instagram: User Friendly or User Foe?

Today Facebook ended a 5 month negotiation with the photo sharing media site Instagram. This billion dollar deal sparks a relationship between 2 of the most popular social networking sites on the internet that can either bring a non profit organization up to par with Facebook and its billions of dollars in annual advertising revenue or bring the photo sharing site to an early demise.
Instagram is a mobile only application that allows users to post and share their own photos with their friends. Facebook however, began with a browser based site and then branched out once the app feature of mobile phones began to take off. Facebook has over 300 millions images posted a day and with the addition of the near 5 billion photos that users have posted on Instagram, this merger could potentially initiate a pure monopoly of the photo aspect of social media.

Posting a photo via Instagram
From an avid social networking users standpoint, this can have positive or negative effects on their loyal following on the site in the near future. From an optimistic viewpoint, having both of these sites working together can make the aspect of posting and viewing photos online much more simple and user friendly. For those of us who are religious social media users who post and share our every action, Instagram on Facebook is a convenient and fun way for them to immediately share cool photos with their friends and family. Instagram allows for business owners to market products and services in a creative way, while using Facebook to allow them to better reach their target audience. For both corporations, this buyout means more users for both sites which will generate more demand for advertising space thus increasing overall profits. The mobile advertising market has began to take off over the past few years as the number of people using smart phones is rapidly increasing. Facebook and Instagram's mobile apps both are well known not to have any advertisements currently but this is expected to change rather soon. The advertising revenue that the incorporation of advertising onto the mobile app will bring will greatly boost the companies net worth but can have a negative user effect. These negative user effects, whether from the perspective of the company or the user, are not just limited to increased advertising. Instagram users have grown to like the fact that the app is ad free. Now that it's combined with Facebook, Instagram users may have to adjust to the excessive influx of adds. Instagram also has its roots in being a user based non-profit application, yet Facebook could change Instagram to be a revenue generating application pushing fees on the user or the overuse of advertisements.These added advertisements could also effect the performance of Instagram, slowing down the processing speed of the phone and overall speed of the application. Facebook could also over intergrate the app into their site making it more difficult for Facebook's competitors, other social media sites, to be able to intergrate or use Instagram on their websites.
These positive and negative effects are of course for now just speculation, but with the deal finally closing we will expect to see major changes on both media sites in the near future.

Cited

Evangelista, Benny. "Facebook's Instagram purchase final."SFGate. (2012): n. page. Web. 7 Sep. 2012. .

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