Instagram Made $20 Billion in 2019 – About Same as Netflix (Report)

Sean Burch
·2 min read

Here’s something Facebook investors will probably like: Instagram, the popular pictures and messaging app owned by Facebook, brought in about $20 billion in advertising revenue in 2019, or more than a quarter of its parent company’s total revenue, according to a report from Bloomberg on Tuesday.

Instagram declined to comment on the report.

Last week, Facebook reported it pulled in $70 billion in revenue for all of 2019, but it did not share how much Instagram contributed to its top line. As a standalone company, Instagram’s $20 billion in sales would match how much Netflix brought in last year. Netflix, of course, makes its money much differently than Instagram, shunning ads in favor of monthly fees from its 167 million global subscribers. (The streaming giant has still found ways to work with brands and bring in some money beyond it’s main revenue source, however.)

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The report comes a day after Google-owned YouTube reported more than $15 billion in annual revenue.

In the last two years, Instagram has increasingly focused on fitting ads in between both user posts and Stories. As Facebook’s growth rate slows, Instagram’s ability to generate big ad dollars becomes increasingly important for its parent company.

Facebook bought Instagram for about $1 billion in 2012, less than two years after its launch. The last time Facebook reported Instagram’s user base in 2018, the app had more than 1 billion users. Last week, Facebook said 2.89 billion people use one of its apps — which includes Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — at least once per month.

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The report from Bloomberg came out about an hour before Snap Inc. — which created features like Stories that Instagram later lifted — is set to report Snapchat’s fourth quarter results.

Read original story Instagram Made $20 Billion in 2019 – About Same as Netflix (Report) At TheWrap