“Eat our dust, Google and Twitter.”
Yes, that’s what Instagram might be thinking about now. After all, Instagram could very well surpass Google and Twitter in U.S. mobile display ad revenues within the next two years.
That’s according to eMarketer’s first-ever forecast detailing expectations for ad spend on this social network. This year, Instagram is expected to haul in $595 million in mobile ad revenues worldwide.
“We expect to see rapid growth in Instagram’s ad revenues this year and throughout the forecast period –driven by high demand for the social network’s new ad products, which will expand beyond branding to include direct response, the ability to buy ads via an API, and enhanced measurement and targeting features,” reports eMarketer.
It also means that by 2017, Instagram’s global mobile ad revenues could represent a hefty 10 percent of parent company Facebook’s global ad revenues.
The eMarketer report — “Instagram Advertising: What Marketers Need to Know” — features revenue forecasts and also analyses of “what marketers should know about Instagram’s user base and its new ad products, including best practices for getting the most out of them.”
A host of new features and opportunities undergird the rosy outlook for Instagram.
“Now that Instagram is opening up, there is a lot of pent-up demand. The rollout of new features over the next several months means that by the end of 2015, Instagram will have a host of new ad products for advertisers large and small. In particular, Instagram advertisers will be able to use a full slate of Facebook targeting tools, including the popular Custom Audiences feature. That will be a key drawing card,” said Debra Aho Williamson, a principal analyst for eMarketer.
Instagram will make the vast majority of its ad dollars in the U.S. for the near future — after all, Instagram advertising is currently available in only seven international markets: Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and the UK. But that will change soon.
“Instagram’s monthly U.S. user base increased nearly 60% in 2014 to 64.2 million people,” eMarketer estimates. “By 2019, over one-third of the country’s population is expected to use the social network, amounting to 111.6 million consumers.”
Google and Twitter eating dust? We want to see a photograph of that on Instagram, for sure.
