New court filings from Meta last week as part of its ongoing antitrust suit with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) revealed that Instagram brought in $32.4 billion, or 27 percent of its parent company’s total revenue, in 2021. The nearly 300-page document for the first time provided a glimpse of how much revenue the photo and video sharing app has generated and how fast it has grown in recent years.
In 2018, the earliest year with available data, Instagram brought in $11.3 billion. By the first half of 2022, the app plowed in $16.5 billion in just six months. The documents also cited independent estimates that Instagram was worth between $80 billion and $100 billion in 2018—a significant premium over what Meta paid for it six years prior ($1 billion).
In 2020, the FTC sued Meta (known as Facebook at the time) in a federal court in Washington D.C., alleging that the social media company had illegally acquired Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014 using its monopoly power. The case was dismissed in 2021, but the FTC refiled an amended version of the suit later that year. Meta attempted to get it dismissed again but was denied. The two factions have grappled over a trial date, which is expected sometime this year. On April 5, Meta filed a motion for the case to be thrown out before it goes to trial, claiming that the company competes fairly in the markets it operates.
“Meta faces fierce competition from a range of platforms—from TikTok and X to YouTube and Snapchat,” Meta wrote in a blog post on April 5. “Further, Meta’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp, which regulators reviewed and cleared more than a decade ago, have benefited consumers.”
Meta is also trying to prove that the developments with Instagram and WhatsApp are not anticompetitive and that they match up with rival social media apps. Between 2013 and 2021, Meta announced 30 features to Instagram, including Stories, Reels and livestream capabilities, according to last week’s document.
Meta bought Instagram for $1 billion in 2012. Instagram’s two founders, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, moved to join Facebook as CEO and chief technical officer of Instagram following the merger. Both executives resigned in 2018 reportedly over disagreements with their boss, Mark Zuckerberg. Systrom and Krieger were replaced by Adam Mosseri, who was Facebook’s head of product at the time.
Systrom and Krieger went on to found an A.I. news app called Artifact, launched in 2023. They recently sold the app to Yahoo, which will integrate its technology into its platforms rather than keep it as a standalone app.