9781422277294

Q uick quiz: If a picture is worth a thousand words, then what is an app that lets you share pictures on your phone worth? How about one billion dollars? That’s howmuch Facebook paid to buy the photo-sharing social network Instagram in April 2012. At the time, Instagram had 30 million registered us- ers posting photos and engaging with other users on its platform. Since then, Instagram has exploded to a whopping 800 million users. Forget about the billion dollars from Facebook—experts in the finance community estimate that Instagram is nowworth more than fifty billion dollars! Not bad for a company that started out with just two employees and re- mained pretty small even as it was becoming a global phenomenon. When Facebook bought the company in 2012, there were still only 13 people working for Instagram. The company has since grown to more than 700 employees— but that’s still about one employee for every one million Instagram users! How did Instagram become such a popular app? Social media had al- ready emerged as a major means of communication thanks to established net- works such Facebook and Twitter. Instagram’s meteoric rise brought a new re- alization: that visual communication—especially on mobile devices—was the wave of the future. The concept of visual communication explains why Instagram is so pop- ular on a global scale. It doesn’t matter if a picture is worth a thousand words or just a couple. A picture can be understood in any language. It didn’t hurt that Instagram came around just as the boom in smart- phones made it easy for anyone to make use of the app. By 2017, more than two billion people around the world had a smartphone. Thanks to Instagram, it

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